5 ms·
Few mummies from the Old Kingdom survive. It was probably a combination of comparatively few people being mummified in that era, the mummification process being
by wl 5y ago
Few mummies from the Old Kingdom survive. It was probably a combination of comparatively few people being mummified in that era, the mummification process being immature and thus less effective, and extreme age allowing for more looting and decay. It's unsurprising that you wouldn't find bodies in an Old Kingdom tomb.
Tellingly, the pyramids at Giza contain the same simple, unadorned carved granite sarcophagi you find in other Old Kingdom tombs. If the pyramids weren't intended to be tombs, you need to explain why they'd place sarcophagi inside them or explain how the sarcophagi are really something else.
Kings and nobles weren't buried in the Valley of the Kings until the New Kingdom. I'm not sure how that's relevant to the Old Kingdom.
- ncmncm 5y agoThe Serapeum of Saqqara, 5 mi away, is full of empty stone sarcophagus-shaped boxes with 10-ton lids, not apparently looted. They are among the mysteries that must await Hawass's retirement to explore properly. AFAIK, nobody knows when or how they were made, or moved into place.
- wl 5y agoThe Serapeum of Saqqara is a New Kingdom site at the earliest. (The name, suggesting a Greco-Roman context, is due to later activity at the site.) I'm not sure why you're bringing them up in an Old Kingdom context. And the decorated "sarcophagus-shaped boxes" are nothing like the Old Kingdom examples. For one, the empty Saqqara sarcophagi are inscribed with standard funerary texts we have no problems reading whereas the Old Kingdom examples are much more crudely constructed and entirely unadorned. It's curious the Saqqara sarcophagi are empty, but given the texts inscribed, the simplest explanation is that they just were never used.
- ncmncm 5y agoThe inscriptions were very obviously not done in the same physical culture as produced the boxes. The boxes are marvels that could not be produced even by the best modern stonecraft methods. The inscriptions are crude hammerings; one might equally-well equate genetic engineering with tattooing. Nobody knows how old the boxes are, or the tunnels they are in. All that is clear is that later people used the site.
- wl 5y agoI don't find your conclusion obvious. Yes, the construction seems better than older Egyptian examples. But that makes sense: the later date of construction in the Iron Age means more ubiquitous iron tools. The inscriptions don't seem crude to me. Better than the Rosetta Stone. Worse than the Stele of Thonis-Heracleion. In short: You don't give Saite-period stonemasons enough credit. But this is a digression. You want to use the refined, elaborately decorated Saite-period empty stone sarcophagi from Saqqara to suggest that the crude, unadorned stone sarcophagi of the Old Kingdom aren't really sarcophagi and the pyramids weren't tombs. If you're going to talk about how the impossible perfection of the sarcophagi at Saqqara means the Saites didn't produce them, for the sake of argument, fine. But you can't use the same reasoning to suggest the sarcophagi in the pyramids, which are by no means "marvels" of stonecraft, come from a different culture than the Old Kingdom.
- ncmncm 5y agoI have no opinion about the intentions for boxes found in the pyramids, and no evidence to cite. But the idea of boxes never intended to contain actual, physical corpses is demonstrated not to be an absurdity. The Rosetta Stone's uneven lines are markedly better-made than the crude inscriptions lately applied to the Saqqara boxes. The quality and precision of stonework seen in the boxes at Saqqara most resembles that of the best archaic and pre-dynastic jars.