Burial demography in the late Middle Kingdom: a social perspective

The paper aims at analysing the social factors connected with the increase of sequential multiple burials around the first quarter of the Second Millennium BC in Egypt. In particular, in the late Middle Kingdom, the practice of multiple burials became more widespread across the whole country and it was more visible at all social levels, reaching also the uppermost levels of society and the royal court. Such a burial demography pattern can be linked with deeper transformations in the social organisation noticeable through iconographic, textual, linguistic, and archaeological evidence: an increase of plurality of people named/represented on stelae; a lexical deviation inside the vocabulary related to ‘familial’ groups (CT 146); the interruption in the archaeological record of the texts known as ‘Letters to the Dead’; the introduction of an uncommon architectural feature in the eastern Delta (Avaris), the ‘house of the dead’. The increase and spread on a preeminent scale of multiple burials drove a renegotiation of the role of the dead body within the burial assemblage. In the light of a changed burial demography, the tomb became the ideal memory container for supporting the identity of a more crowded household structure and dead bodies constituted the tangible mnemonic bridge to the past and social identity. Sequential multiple burials affected also temporality, and the passage of time increased the objectification of the body itself; therefore multiple bodies inside a grave may have influenced the selection of the range of objects to be placed in, as demonstrated by a consistent infiltration of the domestic sphere inside the funerary domain at the end of Twelfth Dynasty.