The Walking Dead at Saqqara

Strategies of Social and Religious Interaction in Practice

Lara Weiss

• Éditeur: De Gruyter
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9783110706932
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Theologie & Religion
• Sous-sujet: Religion der Antike

Funerary rituals and the cult of the dead are classics of research in religious studies, especially for ancient Egypt. Still, we know relatively little about how people interacted in daily life at the city of Memphis and its Saqqara necropolis in the late second millennium BCE. By focussing on lived ancient religion, we can see that the social and religious strategies employed by the individuals at Saqqara are not just means on the way to religious, post-mortem salvation, nor is their self-representation simply intended to manifest social status. On the contrary, the religious practices at Saqqara show in their complex spatiality a wide spectrum of options to configure sociality before and after one's own death. The analytical distinction between religion and other forms of human practices and sociality illuminates the range of cultural practices and how people selected, modified, or even avoided certain religious practices. As a result, pre-funerary, funerary and practices of the subsequent mortuary cults, in close connection with religious practices directed towards other ancestors and deities, allow the formation of imagined and functioning reminiscence clusters as central social groups at Saqqara, creating a heuristic model applicable also to other contexts.

Chapter 1: Introduction

‘The Walking Dead’ in the title of the current study is of course a nod to the famous television series, but it also has a more serious meaning alluding to the fact that from an ancient Egyptian perspective, the deceased and other spiritual beings were actually part of the life of the living and interacted with them. A flowery description of this worldview has been provided by Thomas Mann in his famous Josephroman: “Nicht allein, daß Himmlisches und Irdisches sich ineinander wiedererkennen, sondern es wandelt sich auch, kraft der sphärischen Drehung, das Himmlische ins Irdische, das Irdische ins Himmlische, und daraus erhellt, daraus ergibt sich die Wahrheit, daß Götter Menschen, Menschen dagegen wieder Götter werden können.”¹ A distinction between ‘this world’ and ‘the next’ or the like is therefore to be rejected. If borders existed, they were highly permeable in the context of everyday life in New Kingdom Egypt at Saqqara, for which the current study seeks to conceptualise the various strategies of interaction.

1.1 Scope and motivation

The ‘past’ does not exist as such. Rather, it exists only as it is incarnated and reincarnated in memories, texts, objects, and our ongoing collective activity of reconstruction. Nor is the past that is embodied in an object a fixed quality. It comes to be transformed as its audience and the circumstances in which it is encountered are themselves transformed. The historical significance of an object may itself be reconstituted historically.²

The above quote stems from a study of Indian images but it is highly relevant for the ancient Egyptian context as well, especially if we seek to understand how religious traditions developed over time and how we can reconstruct them in the archaeological record, which reflects the mutual interaction between humans and their environment.³ The current study seeks to understand the lived religious traditions at Saqqara in Egypt, i. e. the cemetery of the ancient city of Memphis, around the time of the reigns of Amenhotep III and Ramesses IV (c. 1390 – 1129 BCE).⁴ To be precise, this study analyses the various strategies of socio-religious interaction of people⁵ in an interesting phase in the history of the site when the highest Egyptian officials built their monumental tombs in the shadow of the pyramids of Old Kingdom kings like Djoser, Unas, and Teti, which had already stood there for over 1000 years (Fig. 1).⁶

Fig. 1: Map of Saqqara with thanks to Nico Staring. This map shows the structures with known location mentioned in this study.

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:

they come forth and sit at [offering] tables; they haunt the living, sowing discord and disease; they offer themselves as healers, saviours and mediators to the gods; and their fate – in the terms of myths of the Osiris – plays an eminent role in the int...