The Old Kingdom cemetery at Hamra Dom (El-Qasr wa es-Saiyad)

The cemetery at Hamra Dom, as a rule called El-Qasr wa es-Saiyad after two villages in the neighbourhood, is one of the "classical" provincial cemeteries from the 6th Egyptian Dynasty. The majority of the hieroglyphic texts has been made accessible to scholars by P. Montet and E. Edel, but the older copies are not always correct, nor have the reliefs of the tombs, with few exceptions, been published.

The present publication is based on a documentation made by the author in 1975 and later in connection with an exploration of the area by an expedition funded by the Smithsonian Institute, the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity at Claremont (California), and the Institute for Ancient Studies of Brigham Young University (Utah), with the primary aim to obtain full information on the archaeology of the area where the famous Gnostic library was found by peasants in 1945.

The reliefs of the Old Kingdom tombs are rendered in line drawings by the author, based on photographs and collated in the tombs. A number of selected photographs is included to show the style. Older copies made some 150 years ago, when the tombs were in a better condition, have also been consulted and supplement the records, especially concerning the now lost tomb of Nefertai, a lady belonging to the same family as the two nomarchs, Thauty and Idu, the owners of the other more important tombs.

The subterranean chambers of the tomb of the nomarch Thauty had never been cleared before and their texts and reliefs were unknown. They have close parallels in the contemporaneous burial chambers in the necropolis at Saqqara but are of a type not known elsewhere in the Upper Egyptian province.

The texts and the scenes are fully analysed and a number of important problems concerning both provincial administration, art and religion are treated. The records yield valuable information on the family of the nomarchs of the seventh Upper Egyptian nome on the reign of king Pepi II and throw light on the administration of the province.

Both their titles and the style of their tombs show close interrelations with the Memphite capital and with the artists of its tombs in the famous necropolis at Saqqara. Some interesting finds made during the clearance of the tombs are also published in the volume.