An Egyptian team has discovered three rock-cut tombs belonging to high officials of the early New Kingdom in the Bubasteion necropolis at Saqqara, according to The Past. The tombs were carved into the rock and are inscribed with the biographies of the men buried within them.
The Bubasteion is a well-known part of the sprawling Saqqara necropolis, the burial ground that served the ancient capital of Memphis for many centuries. The area takes its name from its later association with the cat goddess Bastet, though these particular tombs date to the early New Kingdom, the period that began around the sixteenth century BC and produced many of the officials who served Egypt's most powerful pharaohs.
The three tombs belonged to men who held high office, and the presence of inscribed biographies is significant. Biographical texts of this kind were a common feature of elite tombs, in which the deceased set out their titles, their careers and the deeds for which they wished to be remembered. Such inscriptions are among the richest sources historians and Egyptologists have for reconstructing the administration of the New Kingdom and the lives of the men who ran it.
Rock-cut tombs were shaped directly into the living rock rather than built up from separate blocks, a form well suited to the cliffs and slopes around Saqqara. Their walls provided broad surfaces for the carved and painted decoration that recorded the owner's status and beliefs, and the biographical accounts found in the three newly discovered tombs would have formed part of this display.
Discoveries at Saqqara have come at a steady pace in recent years, as Egyptian teams continue to work across the necropolis. The site has yielded tombs, burials and inscribed material spanning much of ancient Egyptian history, and the Bubasteion has featured prominently in that ongoing work. The identification of three officials from the opening centuries of the New Kingdom adds further names and careers to the record of those who lived and worked around Memphis.
For readers who would like to make sense of the titles and biographical formulae that fill tombs like these, the Hierolyte app teaches the signs from the ground up, so that a carved inscription becomes something you can begin to read for yourself rather than simply admire.