How burial trends in an Ancient Egyptian tomb changed over hundreds of years

Archaeological investigations inside a tomb at the Theban Necropolis, opposite Luxor, have shown how burial rituals in Ancient Egypt altered due to changes in customs, and more practical reasons such as space.

Spanish researchers studied one of the 400 tombs at the 4,000-year-old necropolis on the west bank of the Nile.

The team from the University of La Laguna excavated the chamber, photographed the mummies, and produced sketches and descriptions of their position, orientation and relationship with the tomb’s structures.

The tomb was used and reused between the 25th Dynasty (754-656 BC) and the Ptolemaic period (305–30 BC), when it was abandoned.

They found 16 mummified humans, one dog and the disturbed remains of at least four people.

Over time, the bodies were treated differently. At first they were kept relatively separate, in coffins, before being kept much closer together, sometimes stacked, with arms folded rather than stretched out.

Senior author Dr Miguel Angel Molinero Polo said the earliest people buried there appear to have been of high social standing, as they were interred in coffins, with funerary nets and amulets, and with costly items held in Phoenician amphorae – clay jars – beside them.

In one section, four mummies and one mummified dog were buried on top of one another in the Ptolemaic period.

“The bodies buried in vertical superposition did not have coffins but were carefully mummified. They also can be associated with upright jars that point to a specific ritual not found in the earlier phases of the tomb’s use,” said Dr Molinero Polo.

First author Dr Jared Carballo-Perez said: “One detail I find quite beautiful is the presence of a mummified dog placed directly on top of the mummies of a man and a woman.

“This could indicate a close relationship between these human individuals and the animal, an idea that I think is quite easy to empathise with.”

It could also reflect a further change in ritual practice, with an animal taking on the role of a psychopomp, or a symbolic helper in the journey to the afterlife.

Dr Carballo-Perez told The National that the changes observed were probably both a practical response to lack of space, and a change in custom.

“Space was certainly becoming more restricted but the changes go beyond simply fitting more people into the chamber,” he said. “Coffins gradually stop structuring individual burials, bodies are increasingly superimposed, and arm positions also change. So we seem to be seeing practical constraints combined with a transformation in funerary practice.”

Dr Carballo-Perez said it should not be assumed that because the tomb became more densely used, the occupants were of a lower standing.

“I would be cautious about describing it as a straightforward shift from elite to general use,” he said. “The earliest burials clearly involved considerable investment – coffins, funerary nets, amulets and imported objects – whereas later individuals had different assemblages or no coffins, but were still carefully mummified.

“This may therefore reflect changing ways of investing in the dead rather than simply declining social status.”

Working out who was re-entering the site to carry out funerals was difficult.

“We can reconstruct what people did inside the chamber more securely than who they were: they repeatedly entered it to introduce new bodies and sometimes interacted with earlier funerary deposits,” Dr Carballo-Perez said.

“They may have included relatives or funerary specialists, but we cannot identify them directly from the archaeological evidence.”

The findings suggest the tomb did not become disordered or without structure, or that cultural rites were lost. Instead, they said the chamber should be considered a repeatedly reactivated space, reconfigured by new burials that transformed the organisation without erasing the past.

The study was published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.

Some parts of the tomb were impossible to reconstruct precisely because of century-long use during which the chamber flooded several times, and human re-entry that shifted debris inside the tomb.