This blog post has been written by Sandra Ottens, who has been working as a secretary at the municipality of Amsterdam for thirty years. Sandra studied Egyptology at Leiden University (BA and MA) from 2006 to 2012. She started blogging about her Egyptological adventures when her class attended a two-month study semester in Cairo, visiting a large number of excavation sites (https://egyptoblogie.wordpress.com). Sandra joined the excavations in Amheida (Dakhla Oasis) as an assistant epigrapher to Professor Olaf Kaper for one season in 2012. She wrote her MA thesis on the Seven Hathors, a group of seven goddesses who predicted the fate of new-born children.
This
week in the Egypt Centre’s History course, Ken Griffin discussed the history of
the Old Kingdom with its many pyramids and sun temples. The highest officials
in the government administration were buried in rectangular mastabas in the
tomb fields around the pyramids of their pharaohs, near the capital city of
Memphis (fig. 1). While
the tomb owners themselves were buried in underground shafts, they also built a
chapel above ground where offerings to the deceased could be made. These
chapels were richly decorated with elaborate scenes from the ideal elite
existence in the expectation of prolonging it in the afterlife. The scenes are
often accompanied by texts. There are captions to clarify what is happening,
words that are spoken by the people depicted, and even the lyrics of work songs
sung by those employed to help keep a steady rhythm during strenuous repetitive
work.
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| Fig. 1: Schematic drawing of an Old Kingdom mastaba |
The
decorated chapel walls contain a lot of interesting and original details and
can be read almost like comic books. Note for instance what is happening in figure 2 from the tomb of
princess Idut. The Leiden Mastaba Project was initiated in 1998 to build a
database of iconography in Old Kingdom elite tombs from the Memphite area. The
project, directed by Dr. René van Walsem from Leiden University, resulted in
the original MastaBase on cd-rom in 2008
(published by Peeters
in Leuven). It has since proven to be an
indispensable research tool. In 2014, a group of enthusiastic Egyptologists
from Leiden joined Dr. René van Walsem in forming the Leiden Mastaba Study
Group, to work on an enhanced and updated version of the database. The first
step in the project was making the basic dataset accessible online, to be consulted
free of charge by researchers, students and interested people around
the world. This basic data set can be found on https://digitalegyptology.org/mastabase/.
 |
| Fig. 2: Decoration from the tomb of Idut |
Our current subject is ‘observation texts’. Most mastabas contain one or more large images of the tomb owner looking out over the activities that are depicted on the wall before him or her. That image is usually accompanied by an ‘observation text’, which describes what he or she is looking at, starting with the verb mꜣꜣ (observing). I will give an example from the mastaba chapel of Hetepherakhty (currently in the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (RMO) in Leiden). You can get virtual access to the chapel (on the ground floor of the museum) via this link: https://artsandculture.google.com/partner/rijksmuseum-van-oudheden. Hetepherakhty (fig. 3) had his tomb built in Saqqara during the late Fifth Dynasty, possibly around the same time as Tjenti, whose lintel is in the Egypt Centre collection (W491).
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| Fig. 3: Tomb of Hetepherakhty |
Inside
the chapel on the left (south) wall, Hetepherakhty is shown standing with a
long stick in his hand (fig.
4). Above him, the text gives his name and titles: ‘Eldest of the Hall,
priest of Ma’at, Hetepherakhty’. Behind him at ground level, a servant is
holding a rectangular parasol above his head to shield him from the sunlight. Behind
the servant is a boy described as a ‘follower’, carrying something over his
shoulder. Depicted above the boy is the eldest son of the tomb owner, the judge
and scribe Nyankhptah.
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| Fig. 4: Relief from the tomb of Hetepherakhty |
The
text we are focusing on in our reading group, however, is the column of
hieroglyphs in front of Hetepherakhty: ‘Observing sowing, harvesting of flax,
and mowing of wheat’. Indeed, part of the wall that stretches out before him
contains images of the described activities, and most of the hieroglyphs used
in the ‘observation text’ are repeated to clarify the images (fig. 5). Thousands of
years after they were made, they are also used to teach Egyptologists the
vocabulary that the Egyptians used for their activities.
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| Fig. 5: Relief from the tomb of Hetepherakhty |
At the top left of this image stands a scribe, with some pens behind his right ear and a roll of papyrus under his left arm. Next to him two men are working a plough, drawn by a pair of cows. The text confirms they are ‘sowing with a plough’. The man with the stick is shouting “pull hard!” at the animals. Next to the cows some men are ‘sowing wheat’. In the Egypt Centre’s course on Egyptian textiles I learned that the overarm gesture of the sower also indicates the sowing of cereal seeds, according to Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood. After the sowing the freshly sown seeds are trampled into the soil by some sheep, but in this case the sheep have been almost completely lost due to damage to the wall. Below them is another register showing men cutting ears of wheat with sickles (left and right) and pulling flax plants out of the ground (middle). As Carolyn Graves-Brown is showing in her Egypt Centre course on Egyptian textiles, long flax fibres are very useful for spinning threads for the weaving process.
This
is just a small example of the great variety of activities depicted on mastaba
walls for the tomb owner to observe at his leisure in the afterlife.
Further
reading:
https://nickyvandebeek.com/2016/05/bread-and-beer-for-hetepherakhet/
Such interesting information about the study groups. Thank you.
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