The site also provides an excellent case study because of the great work of almost 50 years of excavations by the now Leiden-Turin Expedition to Saqqara, the Egyptian⁷ and Australian expeditions⁸ at Teti cemetery and South of Unas,⁹ and the French expedition to the Bubasteion.¹⁰ These areas of what was in the past one large necropolis of about 12.5 km² preserved the choices people made regarding where to be buried, thereby integrating both their stories and monuments into the biography of the site.¹¹ It is therefore helpful to conceptualise Saqqara as ‘cultural geography’, i. e. the result of individuals and groups who continuously shaped their environment, and vice versa were shaped by it.¹² While the main interest is in tracing religious traditions, conceptualising the area as cultural geography should help to avoid the automatic presumption that all traces of practices in a cemetery are necessarily religiously motivated. The current study aims to capture the “mutual relationship between religion and [its] environment”,¹³ but also to detect the manifold ways “meaning and social understandings are constructed, contested and negotiated”.¹⁴ Hereby ‘cultural geography’ adds a spatial perspective to what Jörg Rüpke called lived ancient religion, i. e. variation, deviance, and invention of religious practices.¹⁵ This study thus seeks to understand how religious traditions at Saqqara were shaped and modified by means of practice in everyday life, but also to overcome the common misunderstanding that the ancient Egyptians were obsessed with death and immortality.¹⁶ Even though the evidence we have from ancient Egypt in general often stems from mortuary contexts, people’s lives did not centre around death. On the contrary, in the perception of the ancient Egyptians the deceased remained part of the world of the living. As Martin Fitzenreiter aptly described it: