Tombs and Burial Customs of Ancient Egypt
The Egyptian tomb was the eternal house of the deceased. Its walls were the walls of the soul’s new home; its doors were the doors through which the soul would pass in the afterlife; its decoration was the visual statement of the deceased’s continuing identity. The history of Egyptian funerary architecture is therefore not just a history of buildings but a history of beliefs about death, the soul, and the relationship between the living and the dead.
Over three thousand years, the Egyptians produced an extraordinary range of tomb types. The earliest were simple pits in the desert sand. The most elaborate were the pyramids of Giza, the largest buildings in the ancient world. By the New Kingdom, royal tombs had moved to the hidden chambers of the Valley of the Kings, while officials and priests were buried in the Tombs of the Nobles on the surrounding hills. Each type expressed a different aspect of the Egyptian vision of eternity.
The Theological Purpose of the Tomb
The tomb was more than a container for the body. It was a permanent dwelling for the soul. The Egyptian word for tomb, pr-djet, literally means “eternal house,” and the tomb was conceived as a place where the Ka, Ba, and Akh could live, receive offerings, and participate in the rituals of the afterlife.
To function in this way, the tomb had to be more than empty space. It had to be equipped with the things the deceased would need. Statues of the deceased provided a substitute body if the mummy was destroyed. Offering tables and false doors allowed the deceased to receive sustenance. Walls were inscribed with the texts and images of funerary literature to guide the soul through the dangers of the afterlife. Even the orientation of the tomb mattered: most tombs were aligned to the cardinal directions, and royal pyramids were aligned to the stars.
The Earliest Tombs: Predynastic Burials
The earliest Egyptian burials, from the predynastic period (c. 4500–3100 BCE), were simple pit graves in the desert sand. The body was placed in a contracted position, often wrapped in linen or animal skins, and surrounded by a few grave goods (pottery, tools, beads). The dry sand and the depth of the grave combined to produce natural preservation, particularly in the dry cemeteries of the upper Egyptian sites of Naga ed-Der and Abydos.
The burials show no evidence of an elaborate afterlife belief. The grave goods were practical, and the body’s preserved condition was an unintended consequence of the environment. The transition to deliberate preservation, and to the elaborate tomb architecture of the dynastic age, came with the political and religious transformation of the early dynastic period.
Mastabas: The Houses of the Nobles
The earliest monumental tombs of the dynastic period were mastabas, flat-roofed rectangular structures of mudbrick or stone, derived from the forms of the predynastic pit graves. The word “mastaba” comes from the Arabic for “bench,” which is the shape the structures resemble.
A mastaba had an underground burial chamber, cut into the bedrock, and a superstructure with a chapel and a serdab, a small room for the statue of the deceased. The chapel was used by the living to make offerings; the serdab was a substitute for the mummy if the body was destroyed. The walls of the chapel were often inscribed with offering formulae and with scenes of the deceased’s life.
Mastabas were used throughout the Old Kingdom for non-royal burials. The most extensive mastaba field is at Giza, where hundreds of officials were buried near the pyramids of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure. Similar fields are at Saqqara, where the Step Pyramid of Djoser marks the beginning of the pyramid age.
The Step Pyramid and the Birth of the Pyramid
The transition from mastaba to pyramid is associated with the architect Imhotep and the pharaoh Djoser, around 2670 BCE. Imhotep designed a tomb for Djoser that consisted of six mastabas of decreasing size, stacked one on top of the other. The result was the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, the first large stone building in the world and the prototype for the true pyramids of the Fourth Dynasty.
The Step Pyramid was conceived as a stairway to the sky. The pharaoh’s body was placed in a burial chamber beneath the pyramid, and the structure itself was a stone model of the original mound of creation on which Atum had first appeared. The complex around the pyramid included a mortuary temple, a sed festival court, and a complex of subterranean galleries.
The Great Pyramids of Giza
The apex of pyramid construction is reached in the Fourth Dynasty, with the Great Pyramid of Khufu and its companions at Giza. The Great Pyramid, built around 2560 BCE, originally stood 146.6 m (481 ft) tall and was the tallest human-made structure in the world for nearly four thousand years. It was built of more than two million blocks of limestone and granite, each averaging 2.5 tons.
The pyramids at Giza were the culmination of a long process of architectural and theological development. They were conceived as eternal houses for the king, as the point of connection between the earth and the stars, and as the means by which the pharaoh’s soul would ascend to join Ra in the solar barque. Their construction is examined in the pyramids pillar and in how the Egyptians moved stone blocks.
The pyramids did not stand alone. Each was part of a larger complex that included a mortuary temple at the base, a causeway leading down to a valley temple, and a series of subsidiary pyramids for the queen and for offerings. The entire complex was the king’s afterlife estate, and it was maintained by a substantial priestly staff.
The Decline of Pyramids and the Rise of Rock-Cut Tombs
By the end of the Old Kingdom, the pyramid form had begun to decline. The pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties were smaller, less well built, and more often built of mudbrick than of stone. By the First Intermediate Period, the practice had largely been abandoned, and Egyptian kings were buried in a variety of less monumental forms.
The Middle Kingdom saw a return to pyramid building, on a smaller scale, at sites like el-Lisht and Dahshur. The Twelfth Dynasty pyramids were of mudbrick and stone and were surrounded by a network of tombs for queens and officials. The most famous is the pyramid of Senusret III at Dahshur, an early example of the use of a complex of subordinate burials.
The Valley of the Kings
The New Kingdom brought a radical change in royal burial. Pharaohs were no longer buried in pyramids but in hidden rock-cut tombs in a remote wadi on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes. This wadi, the Valley of the Kings, contains the tombs of nearly all the New Kingdom pharaohs, from Thutmose I to Ramesses XI.
The reasons for the change are not entirely clear. Practical considerations (the difficulty of guarding a pyramid, the visibility of pyramids to tomb robbers, the cost of pyramid construction) probably played a role. Theological considerations were also at work: the new conception of the afterlife, as expressed in texts like the Amduat and the Book of Gates, was centered on the solar journey and required a different kind of tomb.
The tombs of the Valley of the Kings are described in detail in the Valley of the Kings: tombs of the pharaohs. The most famous is KV62, the tomb of Tutankhamun, discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter.
The Tombs of the Nobles
While the pharaohs were being buried in the Valley of the Kings, the officials of the court were being buried on the surrounding hills. These Tombs of the Nobles, particularly at sites like Sheikh Abd el-Qurna and Deir el-Medina, contain some of the most beautiful examples of Egyptian funerary art.
The tombs of the nobles were T-shaped or L-shaped chambers, cut into the cliffs of the Theban hills. The walls were covered with paintings and reliefs showing the deceased at work, at home, and in the presence of the gods. Scenes of daily life (agriculture, fishing, banquets, music) were meant to ensure that the deceased could continue to enjoy these activities in the afterlife. The tomb of Senenmut, the architect of Hatshepsut, and the tombs of the workers at Deir el-Medina are particularly well known.
The full account of these tombs is given in the Tombs of the Nobles at Thebes.
Thebes: The Great Necropolis
Thebes was the religious capital of Egypt during the New Kingdom and the site of an enormous necropolis on its west bank. The west bank was the realm of the dead, where the sun set and entered the underworld. It was here, in the desert hills and the desert edge, that the kings, queens, nobles, and priests of the New Kingdom were buried.
The west bank of Thebes contains the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, the Tombs of the Nobles, and the mortuary temples of the pharaohs, including the great temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari and the mortuary temple of Ramesses II (the Ramesseum). The whole area was associated with Thebes and the cult of Amun, whose principal temple was the Temple of Karnak on the east bank.
If you walk around the back of the Ramesseum today, you will find a fallen colossus that inspired Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1818 poem “Ozymandias.” The head is in the British Museum, and the inscription on the chest, “King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If any would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works,” is a famous meditation on the impermanence of power.
Offering Formulae and Sustenance for the Dead
Every Egyptian tomb was equipped with provisions for the dead. The most common form was the offering formula, the ḥtp-di-nsw, in which the king (or the god) was asked to provide offerings of bread, beer, oxen, fowl, alabaster, and linen to the deceased. The formula was inscribed on tomb walls, on offering tables, and on funerary stelae.
In addition to the formula, tombs contained actual offerings for the early period of the burial. Bread, meat, and beer were placed in the burial chamber, and a model of the offering was sometimes carved in stone to ensure that the deceased would never be without sustenance. The statue of the deceased in the serdab served a similar function: it was an alternative body that could receive offerings if the mummy was destroyed.
A small detail worth noting: the most common offering in a New Kingdom private tomb is a simple round loaf of bread and a jar of beer, with an onion and a sprig of lettuce for garnish. The Egyptians were, like the rest of us, particular about how their food looked.
The Burial Procession
The actual burial was the culmination of a long sequence of rituals. After the seventy-day mummification process, the body was taken from the workshop to the tomb in a procession that included family, priests, and professional mourners. The Opening of the Mouth ceremony was performed at the tomb entrance: a priest touched the mummy’s mouth with an adze, restoring the ability to speak, eat, and drink. The deceased was then placed in the burial chamber, and the tomb was sealed.
The Opening of the Mouth ceremony is one of the most important rituals in Egyptian funerary religion. It is described in detail in the Book of the Dead, and it is depicted in tomb paintings from the Old Kingdom onward. Without this ceremony, the deceased would be unable to make use of the offerings or to speak in the afterlife. The ceremony is examined in the broader context of mummies and the afterlife.
Late Period and Greco-Roman Burials
In the late period and the Ptolemaic era, Egyptian burial practices continued but with regional variations. In some areas, mummification declined in quality, and bodies were preserved only partially. In other areas, particularly the Fayum, the art of mummification produced some of the most striking portraits in Egyptian history: the so-called Fayum mummy portraits, painted on wooden panels and attached to the mummies, give us a vivid picture of the people of Greco-Roman Egypt.
By the time of the Roman conquest in 30 BCE, mummification was already in decline. It continued in some communities until the Arab conquest, but the elaborate theological framework that had sustained it had largely faded. The tombs of the late period, while often impressive, were no longer built to the same standards of architectural and ritual complexity as the great tombs of the New Kingdom.
The Burial of the Common Egyptian
Most Egyptians were not pharaohs. The vast majority were farmers, laborers, and craftsmen, and their burials were correspondingly modest. The typical non-elite burial of the New Kingdom consisted of a wrapped body in a simple wooden coffin, placed in a shallow pit in the desert sand, accompanied by a few grave goods and a stela bearing the offering formula.
The Egyptians did not believe that only the rich could achieve the afterlife. On the contrary, the funerary literature that was reserved for kings in the Old Kingdom was, by the New Kingdom and later, available to anyone who could afford a copy of the Book of the Dead. The democratization of the afterlife is one of the most striking features of Egyptian religious history, and it made the mortuary industry a substantial part of the Egyptian economy.