The Senses & the Sacred: A Multisensory and Digital Approach to Examining an Ancient Egyptian Funerary Landscape

Abstract

What makes a space feel sacred? How did ancient people create a physical and emotional ‘sense’ of specialness or distinction in their ritual places? The ancient Egyptians created at least two major zones of ritualised space (demarcated from the secular parts of their cities and towns), the temple and the cemetery. While scholars have addressed the multisensory techniques utilised by kings and priests to craft the temple precinct into a sacred landscape, the sensory experience of the necropolis remains undertheorized. This gap results from the challenge of comprehending the vast funerary landscapes that have experienced dramatic change since ancient times, changes which have obscured ancient ground level and pathways as well as dramatically altered the appearance of monumental tomb architecture. In this chapter, I combine textual, art historical, and archaeological evidence for the sounds, smells, and visual experiences of ancient people at an Egyptian necropolis with 3D GIS technologies that attempt to virtually represent ancient ritual spaces in their form during the Pharaonic Period. The necropolis of Saqqara, bordering the administrative centre Memphis and one of Egypt’s oldest elite burial grounds, is used as a case study to explore the ancient Egyptian funerary landscape from a multisensory perspective.

1 Introduction

Ancient Egyptian towns and cities included two important spheres of sacred space distinguished geographically or architecturally from the rest of the urban settlement: the temple and the cemetery. The temple served as the ‘house’ for the local manifestation of the god, and the sensory aspects of the elaborate structures and ceremonies used by the kings and priests to create a sanctified home for the divine have been studied extensively by scholars (Shafer 1997; Dorman and Bryan 2007). The sensory experience of the necropolis, final resting place and site of elaborate funerary rituals for royals and elites, in contrast, remains undertheorized. Cemetery landscapes have been greatly altered by environmental and human forces in the intervening millennia since their use. These changes have obscured ancient ground horizon, erased original processional routes, and modified the visual and physical relationships between buildings and those inhabiting the landscape. Multisensory consideration of these spaces, examining how the ancient Egyptians produced a physical and emotional ‘sense’ of specialness or distinction in the funerary landscape, have thus been limited.

In this chapter, I use primary source texts and artistic depictions related to funerary and mortuary cult events at the site of Saqqara, as well as the archaeological traces of these ceremonial activities, to explore the visual, audio and olfactory world of the necropolis in Egypt’s New Kingdom. These records are augmented with data gleaned from a 3D GIS model of the site that visualises physical and material elements of the cemetery frequently indiscernible today. Following the ideas of Day (2013: 6), this work thus attempts to embed visual analysis in its larger sensory network, exploring how visual impressions could have been integrated with other sensory experiences, while grounding the examination in archaeological and historical evidence. It also claims to show how 3D modelling can contribute to the study of sacred landscapes, especially those that have altered tremendously over time.

2 Sensory Archaeology and Egyptology

The wider discipline of Archaeology’s interest in a robust examination of sensory and embodied aspects of the lives of ancient peoples (Fahlander and Kjellström 2010; Day 2013; Hamilakis 2013; and Skeates and Day 2019) has not yet found major traction in the field of Egyptology.¹ Currently, no single work addresses the senses in Egypt in a comprehensive manner. This is despite extensive consideration of the senses in Egyptology’s sister field of Classical Studies, such as a recent a six-volume multi-authored set covering sight, smell, taste, sound, touch and synaesthesia (Butler and Purves 2013, 2017; Bradley 2015; Squire 2016; Rudolph 2017; Butler and Nooter 2019). However, relevant topics occasionally appeared in late twentieth-century publications, including the sensuous aspects of Egyptian religion (Finnestad 1999), music (Manniche 1991), and the composition, sourcing, use and representation of fragrance in daily life and ritual activities (Cherpion 1994; Manniche 1999). A number of more recent analyses centering individual or multiple senses in their investigations suggest interest is growing, and these include studies on the relationship between smells and religious concepts of the divine (Wise 2009; Lieven 2016a; Price 2018; Goldsmith 2019), sound inside the temple (Elwart and Emerit 2019) and in literary contexts (Manassa 2011), the soundscapes of war (Matić 2018), and experiential elements of taking part in Egyptian festivals (Pellini 2015). Because there is still a lack of general discussion of the senses in the Egyptian conception, I will provide a brief review here, focusing on ritual contexts.

3 The Human Sensorium in Pharaonic Egypt

The ancient Egyptians identified the importance of the five Aristotelian physical sensations, including touch, taste, smell, hearing and seeing, yet they did not classify them together as a distinct group connoting ‘the senses’. Perhaps the closest categorization was their designation of the seven important orifices on the human head (two ears, mouth, two nostrils, two eyes), conceived of as the ‘seat of the principal faculties’ of a person (Van de Walle 1985: 365, my translation from the French). To ‘taste’, the verb in the Egyptian language, also connoted ‘to experience’, indicating the broad metaphorical understanding of that sense (Manassa 2011: note 3). Touching was a critical part of diagnosis in Egyptian medicine, deemed necessary for comprehension of illnesses, and the connection to its practice in medicine suggests a conceptual link between that sense and knowledge acquisition (Manassa 2011: note 4; Allen 2005: 70–115). Sound (both hearing and speaking), breathing and smell, and sight were the focus of the sensorium in the Egyptian worldview, as these were the aspects of the person deemed most critical for individual understanding. The heart ( ) was deemed the seat of justice, free-will, cognition, memory and action (Assmann 2002, 2005), and Egyptian theology construed it as guided by those sensations (Van de Walle 1985: 368): ‘Sight, hearing, breathing—they report to the heart, and it makes every understanding come forth. As to the tongue, it repeats what the heart has devised’ (Lichtheim 1973: 54).² Speaking, seeing and breathing were actions of the living body imagined as revivified magically at the tomb in the ‘opening of the mouth’ ceremony, the climax of the funerary service in which religious spells engendered eternal life to the deceased. Funerary text recitations explicitly aspired to both the ‘opening of the mouth and eyes’ of the corpse (Assmann 2005: Chap. 13). A New Kingdom purification spell at Theban tomb 23 affirmed the final purpose of the ceremony of bodily reactivation was the transformation of the deceased into a divine being:

May the divine words purify you,

may your mouth be opened by the chisel of Ptah.

May your two eyes be opened for you…

May linen belong to your mummy

and breath be at your nose, that you not suffocate

May you emerge as a living ba (Assmann 2005: 323)

These funerary concepts ran parallel to the creation myths recorded at Esna temple in which the god Khnum shaped the first man, and to make him live, ‘he opens his eyes and his ears’ (Emerit 2011: 68).

The actions of hearing, smelling and seeing all held strong ritualised meanings in Egyptian culture. ‘to hear’, or ‘to listen’, could connote ‘to obey’, and the living went to great lengths to hear, address, and follow the will of the gods, as well as their deceased ancestors, all of whom they communicated with via ritualised practices (Emerit 2011: 65–66, 83). The material expression of these practices resulted in a number of charmingly literal votive offerings of model ears (Pinch and Waraksa 2009) and stelae with inscribed depictions of ears, interpreted by scholars as ‘encouraging…the deity to hear a prayer’ (Pinch 1993: 253). Hearing was closely tied in the Egyptian language to the concept of speaking, and the term , ‘voice’, also connoted music, noise, or sound (von Lieven 2016b: 25). Chanting, clapping and the playing of musical instruments, especially the sistrum, were an integral aspect of temple ritual and religious festivals (Finnestad 1999: 113; Manniche 1991: 60–73). The act of speaking was itself a form of creation, and a number of Egyptian myths recount how a creator god, existing in a primordial ocean, spoke aloud and the world came into being (von Lieven 2016b: 32). Invocation offering formulae, repeated on hundreds of elite tombs, requested a voice offering ( ), literally ‘the going forth of the voice’, from the visitor. The repetition aloud of the names of offerings magically gave them existence in the tomb and sustained the deceased in the necropolis (Strudwick 2005: 31–32):

O you who live on earth… who shall pass by this tomb: pour water, make invocation offerings from that which you have! If you have nothing, (then) speak with your mouth and offer with your hands: ‘a thousand of bread and beer…’ (Strudwick 2005: 223).³

Sounds and the spoken word thus held ‘inherent power’, with divine and ritualized words effective⁴ on the cosmic and earthly level (von Lieven 2016b: 34).

Smell offered a potent means to interact with the divine. The most common Egyptian term for ‘to breathe’ or ‘smell’, , was utilised in mythological texts and relief scenes where the gods interacted with the king; the intimacy of exchanging breath and scents with the gods demarcated the king as super-human (Beaux 2015: 68–69). In the temple, priests burned fragrant incense and anointed the small statues of the gods (protected in the temple interiors) with fragrant oils, many of which were imported at substantial cost from sub-Saharan Africa or Arabia (Manniche 1999: 25–26). The heady scents were imagined as originating in and emanating from the bodies of the gods themselves, and thus ‘by means of odour the officiants could reach parts of the divine power which they could not even see’ (Manniche 1999: 25–26, 34). These divine smells operated in the funerary sphere as well, as such unguents were imagined to remove the stink of death and heal the dissociated dead,⁵ reuniting their parts and turning them into divine beings (Manniche 1999: 35), a concept already developed in the first recorded funerary spells (dated to the Old Kingdom), the Pyramid Texts:

Ho, Pepi Neferkare! I have come to you too, that I might fill you with the oil that comes from Horus’s eye. I fill you with it so that it will tie together your bones, join together your limbs for you, collect your flesh for you, and release your bad sweat. When you have received its scent on you, your scent will be sweet like the Sun when he comes from the Akhet…(Allen 2005: spell 637, from pyramid of Pepi II)

One of the most effective forms of ritual communication and connection in Egyptian culture was sight. Seeing ( , ‘to see’, or , ‘to perceive/behold’) was a reciprocal act, with the eye an active agent that reached out—a concept likely stemming from the myth of the powerful ‘divine eye’ (Van de Walle 1985: 370). In looking upon the god (or the king in his divine form), a person interacted with him or her, benefited from their divine presence, and could even be healed by this sight, and thus prayers to ‘see the god’ were repeated in a variety of types of texts: ‘May my body be renewed at seeing Amon-Re…’ (Tosi and Roccati 1972: 209, object 50259; Van der Plas 1989: 27, from a chapel at Deir el Medina, Thebes). Viewing or being seen was participatory and included the viewer in ritual practice and allowed him or her to acquire sustenance, sacral knowledge, and advantage through the visual relationship (Sullivan 2020: Sect. 3. 2).

Vision was key for both the living and the dead. Images of the dead (in statue form or carved in relief in the tomb) perpetuated their existence eternally (Robins 1997: 12). The dead were imagined as retaining their ocular functions, and the sides of coffins sometimes included representations of eyes, to assure that the deceased could peer outward (Van der Plas 1989: 6). Indeed, the effective dead could act upon what they saw, as is clear from tomb inscriptions describing the transformation of the dead into their mobile ba form in death:

Transforming into a living ba

So as to alight on his grove

And enjoy the shade of its sycamores

and sit in the rear part of the pyramid,

while his statues endure in his house

and receive the offerings…

…transforming into a living ba.

May he again see his house of the living,

so as to be a protection to his children daily,

forever and ever (Assmann 2005: 216).

Hearing/speaking, smelling/breathing, and seeing/being visible all thus had specialised sacral connotations in the Egyptian worldview. The senses were not only a means for a person to acquire knowledge about their surroundings, but additionally instruments to access the divine and to bridge the gap between the living and the dead. This is crucial to understanding the experience of Egyptian sacred spaces—royal and elite spaces were orchestrated to activate the senses in particular ways, to create unique places that smelled, sounded, looked, and felt distinct from the mundane world. This was true within the thick enclosure walls of the protected temple precinct, but also in the open necropolis. This work will explore how a ‘sense of the sacred’ was reinforced within the elite funerary landscape, using the cemetery of Saqqara as a case study.

4 The Egyptian ‘Funerary Landscape’ and Digital Archaeology

Funerary landscapes are particular types of archaeological landscapes where social and community identity, as well as structures of social and political power, are created and maintained through the repeated activities revolving around the death, burial and commemoration of the deceased (Härke 1997; Daróczi 2012). They are loci for ‘intense’ human experiences, where emotional and phenomenological encounters may be significantly tied to place and memory (Daróczi 2012: 200), and thus especially useful locations for the study of sensory experience. From the Early Dynastic through the Late Period in Egypt, the elite necropolis was often a high desert site bordering the town areas where corpses were meant to be protected in closed underground burials, usually marked by some type of chapel above. The burial was celebrated by a community procession to the tomb, at which a priest performed rituals meant to facilitate the regeneration of the deceased. Because the dead were conceived of as joining the ancestors and continuing to exist after death, a key element of Egyptian culture was the perpetuated mortuary cult. This centred on an accessible part of the tomb superstructure, where priests and family members presented offerings to the blessed dead, who needed the same types of sustenance as the living (Ikram 2015: 27). The hope was that this familial offering practice would endure for generations, but even passing visitors were encouraged to participate in cult veneration (Dodson and Ikram 2008: 21–22; Martin 1997: 22; Martin et al. 2012: 19–20). Cemeteries therefore were not closed off from the population (like temples), but instead offered continued access to the chapels of the ancestors, eternally reifying social hierarchies and relationships that developed out of the state system.

Elite cemeteries in ancient Egypt were specialised, highly structured spaces, with monumental tomb constructions and their related texts and artistic imagery following strict precedents (albeit with some room for innovation) within the major periods of state power throughout the Pharaonic Period. In some cases, elite tombs were grouped around royal monuments, or located in direct relationship with royal tombs nearby. The repetition of architectural forms⁶ and descriptions and depictions of funerary and mortuary activities within the tombs⁷ demonstrated great consistency and continuity in the events that took place at these cemeteries, with major differences focusing less on the form of proceedings, but rather the elaborateness of the ceremonies, depending on the wealth of the individual. Thus, here I trace a sensory path through the necropolis of the New Kingdom, utilising primary sources woven together from a variety of tomb and funerary materials representative of broader cultural patterns. These sources include inscriptions carved into the architectural elements of tombs, painted representations of funeral activities, and archaeological remains that document human behaviour on the ground. I focus when possible on materials from the site of Saqqara, but augment these with information from comparable sites.

While the richness of the Egyptian textual and artistic record makes such an exploration possible, with direct reference from an emic perspective on elements of sounds, smells and actions in the funerary landscape, understanding of the original spatial context of cult rituals remains incomplete.⁸ Here is where digital methods can expand our capacities. Specifically, the affordances of cyber-archaeology, where scholars can consider ‘potential pasts’ in a virtual environment (Forte and Siliotti 1997), are brought to bear on the funerary landscape of Saqqara. Although archaeologists today can walk through the ruins of Saqqara’s monumental pyramids and tombs, the necropolis and associated city of Memphis are tremendously altered from Pharaonic times. In some locations, ground level has risen many metres, burying or obscuring superstructures that were once highly prominent. Grand stone and mud-brick monuments that formerly towered over the cemetery stand in various states of collapse, their stones removed in both ancient and Mediaeval times by resourceful ‘recyclers’, or their bricks deflated due to thousands of years of rain and abrasive blowing sand. The monumental temples of Memphis are today barely visible, swallowed up by the rising Nile floodplain. Digital methods are here used to therefore investigate aspects of the visual landscape inaccessible for study in the field today.

The material expression of monumental tombs is particularly important for a sensory evaluation of the funerary landscape, as sensory experiences are not individual, isolated perceptions, but instead emerge from the interaction between person and the material object (Riggs 2016: 249–250). The tomb monument at Saqqara structured the performance of, and interaction between, participants in funeral services and mortuary cults, staging ritual practice in highly formalised ways. The monument’s specific type of temporality, quasi-permanent (built or lined with stone blocks) manifesting centuries of cultural continuity, yet chronologically distinct (with superstructure forms easily demarcated by time period) and vulnerable to the processes of deflation and collapse (displaying the passage of time and ‘ancientness’), signalled social and political messages about the position of the present in terms of the past.⁹ Yet building prominence, as well as the original visual impact of architectural materials, colours and textures, has significantly diminished due to the ravages of time. Later constructions are layered on top of or around those of the earlier periods. Key elements that contributed to the visual power of the sacred funerary landscape at any given point in the Pharaonic Period—the physical and visual links that would have constituted a powerful sense of place, but that are rarely referred to in Egyptian funerary literature in specific ways¹⁰—have faded in modern times. It is precisely these material aspects of the landscape that can be visualised in 3D GIS models, allowing the archaeologist to reimagine and hypothesise how such elements contributed to the sensory experience of the necropolis.

In the digital model utilised for this study, informed ‘reconstruction’ of original building heights, shapes, materials, placement and lighting was based on GIS data, published excavation reports, comparative examples, modern digital imagery, and even artistic depictions of Saqqara monuments. Using this information, simple 3D massing models of basic architectural elements of building superstructures were built for more than eighty-five key monuments at Saqqara. The 3D model takes a ‘maximalist’ approach, including not only those well-documented monuments, but also adding in hundreds of mastaba tombs (many excavated in the early twentieth century) as procedural models, whose form in the visualisation is a schematic one, generated by the software program based on the recorded 2D footprint (length and width) of the tomb. Each monument was linked to a time-slider, appearing chronologically in the 3D model during the Egyptian dynasty in which it was built. Four terrain models, each representing ground horizon across a different timespan, were produced from topographic line maps of the site. These were each modified to reflect the changing ancient ground levels documented by the continuous rise of building threshold and floor levels over the centuries. The terrains were also linked to the time-slider, so that monuments and topography in the 3D visualisation change in parallel across space and time. This combination of temporally reimagined terrains and monuments has allowed for the hypothetical placement of elements of the sacred landscape back into the virtual scene for consideration, expanding our opportunities to evaluate how the material impacted the creation of meaning at Saqqara. Because this type of virtual ‘reconstruction’ of an entire ancient landscape necessitates a great deal of hypothesis—and each individual building reconstruction includes various levels of uncertainty in form—the building and publication of the model was robustly annotated with descriptive metadata and paradata.¹¹ Such layered and complex 3D visualisations admittedly ask a great deal of the viewer, and necessitate engagement with the base data through various channels—in the case of this project, through metadata available via the online 3D GIS web-browser and through the documentary metadata and paradata included in the model’s full publication, both available elsewhere (Sullivan 2020).

This article argues that it is the combination of robust primary sources with the capabilities of cyber-archaeology toolkits that opens up exciting possibilities for exploring aspects of the sensory landscape. Historical sources have been supplemented with digital engagement in the material world to assess the impact of the original structures on the funerary landscape. While the culturally conditioned nature of the senses may not allow modern researchers to grasp any individual’s experience or emotional response to sensory stimuli (Houston and Taube 2000: 262; Squire 2016; Nyberg 2010), we can seriously assess the potential for sensory engagement of specific material objects within a known cultural framework, as well as consider aspects of material culture that do not easily survive in the archaeological record (Hurcombe 2007).

5 A Multisensory and Digital Exploration of the Saqqara Funerary Landscape in the New Kingdom

The necropolis of Saqqara extends north and south along a high plateau west of the Nile floodplain. Although a dry, desert-like environment in the New Kingdom, it was an active landscape. At any given moment, labourers would have moved materials up the escarpment to the multiple elite tombs under construction.¹² The sounds and vibrations of hammers and chisels on stone, and the murmurs of workmen would have been common. Annually, festival events would have transformed the cemetery into a space where the living comingled directly with the god (and the dead), at events like the festival of Sokar, where that deity emerged from the temple and paraded through the necropolis on a special barque, preceded by a night of rituals where participants wore garlands of onions (Brovarski 1984).¹³ At the death of the Apis bull, housed at the Ptah temple in Memphis, the body of the mummified bull (imagined as an incarnation of the god) was dragged up the escarpment in procession to the Serapeum for burial, and the cemetery again manifested the direct presence of the divine.¹⁴ The related sounds, smells and sights of such intermittent activities would have blended with those tied to the everyday ritual activities at Saqqara, the funeral and the elite mortuary cults, described in detail below.

5.1 Funerals

When an elite member of the New Kingdom royal court or administration died, he likely would have already spent many years preparing a tomb in his chosen necropolis.¹⁵ Those selecting to be buried at Saqqara often held careers in state administration, the temple of Ptah at Memphis, or one of the solar deities at Heliopolis, all located in the floodplain settlement areas east across the Nile river. After death, numerous funerary texts describe the ceremonial transport of the body over water to the west, approaching the necropolis from the town (Hays 2010: 3). The open court of the tomb of Mose depicts the beginning of a funeral procession, which may have started soon after dawn, with mourners and the coffin rowed in boats across the Nile. The corpse, protected by a series of coffins and outer shrine, was then laid on a sledge and pulled up over the sands of the Saqqara plateau by oxen. Priests ‘opened the way’, pouring milk to smooth the path, while burning incense to purify the route, the pungent scents probably of frankincense or myrrh (Gaballa 1977: 16–17 and pl. XXXV). Family members and professional colleagues joined the procession, making it a major community event. The tomb of Meryneith represents large groups of people taking part in the procession, including priests, officials, mourners and even horse-drawn chariots (Raven et al. 2014: 94–96). Relief scenes suggest a cacophonous affair, with professional mourners in accompaniment, including women and men (some with titles of ‘singer’) who wailed in grief and covered themselves in dust.¹⁶ Porters are shown carrying grave goods, such as chests, baskets, and furniture, and vessels filled with drink, oils and fragrances. Mourners may have carried or worn fragrant bouquets of lotus flowers (Hays 2010: 6; Teeter 2011: 138–139; Assmann 2005: 302, 318; Manniche 1999: 108–109). Groups of male dancers, called the muu, joined the procession, performing a series of steps and elaborate arm gestures (Teeter 2011: 143–4). The dance, deriving from the Old Kingdom or earlier, was meant to demarcate the liminal space between the living and dead opened at the funeral, the dancers personifying the powerful ancestral spirits linked with early kingship (Meyer-Deitrich 2009: 5; Kinney 2004).¹⁷

Somewhere behind the coffin, other mourners pulled shrines with the canopic jars, statues of the deceased to serve the ongoing mortuary cult,¹⁸ as well as elaborately wrapped remnants of the embalming process (Assmann 2005: 299–303). Later New Kingdom tomb reliefs, like those in the tombs of Horemheb, Meryneith and Maya, show the procession serviced by shaded arbours supplied with offerings for the deceased, including fruits, garlands of lotus flowers, vessels of liquid and meats (Raven et al. 2014: 94–95; Martin 1989: 101–102, pls. 123–4; Martin et al. 2012: pl. 32 scene 42) which may have sustained the mourners on their journey and filled the air with their scents (Assmann 2005: 309).

Tomb texts do not specify the route travelled on any New Kingdom funeral procession at Saqqara, and it is possible each funeral traced a unique path. But for the living climbing the escarpment, the visual and physical presence of hundreds of funerary structures passed on any route, including already ancient stone pyramids and mastaba tombs, must have offered great potential to invoke an emotional response. The renewed mortuary cults of select Old Kingdom kings —deified into local gods—included two whose pyramids were located northeast of the step pyramid enclosure, Menkauhor and Teti. These Old Kingdom royal spaces were reclaimed and reinterpreted by the elite New Kingdom Egyptians (1000 years later); for example, king Teti was newly envisioned as ‘beloved of Ptah’, linking him to the New Kingdom Memphite temple that housed the living Apis bull and the associated processional that passed nearby extending to the Serapeum (Málek 1992: 67–72). Wealthy officials clustered their tombs around the Old Kingdom pyramids, presumably seeking a connection to divinity for their burial.¹⁹ New Kingdom Memphites erected dedicatory stelae and statues to the former kings, like the one depicting a man named Amenwahsu adoring Teti-Merenptah (Naville 1878: Tafel IV; Porter and Moss 1981: 729). The god was represented as standing in his pyramid, suggesting the monument still served as a key visual marker in the New Kingdom (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

Line drawing of a relief scene on the side of an unprovenanced statue probably from Saqqara, now in the Musée d'archéologie in Marseille, showing the scribe Amunwahsu (left) kneeling and praising the king (right) ‘Teti-Merenptah’ (his name labelled in the cartouche), published in Naville (1878: tafel IV)

The 3D GIS model suggests that the ruins of the Menkauhor (potentially 35 m tall)²⁰ and Teti (originally 52.5 m tall) pyramids would indeed have constituted the defining visual feature for those approaching the small New Kingdom temple-tombs erected in this part of the necropolis (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

3D model render of the area around the New Kingdom private tombs (small buildings with mud-brick pyramids, right, near the three small queen’s pyramids) located north of the Old Kingdom Teti and Menkaure pyramids (shown as deflating ruins, left), with late morning lighting and shadow, view is looking southwest, render by the author in e-on Vue software

New Kingdom elites potentially sited their tombs near these ruins to evoke an impression of continuity that asserted the New Kingdom tomb owner as the direct inheritor of the glorious (Old Kingdom) past (Bauer and Kosiba 2016), turning the early kings into eternal and beneficent neighbours, and confirming the newcomers’ place in the immortal order. The funeral participants approaching this area may have been meant to feel awe at such antiquity and reverence for the more contemporary dead now buried nearby.

Once the procession reached the tomb at midday, the priests, family members and body of the deceased would have entered into the outermost court or forecourt.²¹ The coffins were opened and the mummy placed upright, facing the south of the court. The deceased was meant to be purified and recharged by the powerful rays of the solar disc Re, now at its peak in the noon sky (Assmann 2005: 318–320).²² Light here acquired a religious role, converting ‘daytime’ into something with religious power in the funerary space.²³ The court, a space designed to be open to the sky, but enclosed with walls and often lined with pillars,²⁴ would have been almost blinding in the intense Egyptian sun. Examples like that of Amenemone (Figs. 3 and 4) would have provided only small amounts of shade under its portico at noon, and none in the court itself.

Fig. 3

3D model render of the interior of the court of the New Kingdom tomb of ‘the overseer of craftsmen and chief goldsmith’ Amenemone near the Teti pyramid at Saqqara, visualising light in the courtyard at midday, with only the area of the western portico in shade; note that the tomb reconstruction is highly schematic and does not include exact column details, reconstruct relief or painting in the court, or include the cult statue in the central chapel; render by the author in e-on Vue software

Fig. 4

Archival photo showing view of the cult statue, courtyard, and western portico of the tomb of Amenemone near the Teti pyramid at Saqqara during its discovery by Victor Loret in 1898, copyright Biblioteca e Archivi di Egittologia, Università degli Studi di Milano

If tomb reliefs do not tremendously exaggerate the quantity of funeral participants, the court may have stood packed with observers, most fully exposed to the sunlight. In Egypt’s invariably cloudless sky, the participants positioned in the open court would have felt the heat of the solar rays radiating through their bodies, and perhaps this added to the communal belief in the ‘recharge’ of the mummy. With the mummy released from the enclosed coffins and bathed with direct sun, the warming embalming chemicals may have diffused the potent scent of natron to those standing in front.

The priests performed the ‘opening of the mouth’ ritual, and in a practice derived from one enacted on tomb statuary in the Old Kingdom, encircled the mummy four times, burned incense, and repeatedly intoned the wish to ‘Be pure! Be pure!’²⁵ (Assmann 2005: 313; Teeter 2011: 139–140). The ritual included touching the mouth of the mummy with special instruments, an act intended to magically re-animate the image of the dead with the ability to breathe and speak, essential to defend himself during his final judgement by the gods (Hays 2010: 7–8). The priest offered to the face of the mummy the foreleg of a calf, in theory butchered at this moment in the tomb, ‘the still warm vital energy streaming out of it’, imagined as transferring its own power of life to the mummy and reanimating it (Assmann 2005: 324–5).²⁶ If the butchering indeed took place at or immediately outside the tomb, the cries of the dying animal, the smell of the fresh blood, and the dripping red limb could have created a moment of intense sensory drama for witnesses.²⁷

The chief lector priest recited spells to guarantee the transfiguration of the dead. An offering ritual was performed, meant to supply the deceased with sustenance for the afterlife. Sets of new vessels carried up during the procession, elaborately painted with blue floral motifs, held food and drink to be presented.²⁸ Family members burned incense, as depicted in the north chapel of the tomb of Khay, which shows the tomb owner’s son Neferbau censing before the mummy (Martin et al. 2001: 13 and plates 8, 52). At some point in the service, the mummy was likely anointed with fragrant oils, such as moringa oil, examples of which were found at the tomb of Maya.²⁹ Perhaps at sunset, torches of fine linen were lit and offered to the deceased, their flames doused in bowls of scented milk only after a priest had chanted related spells from the Book of the Dead. The darkening of the sky and the simultaneous extinguishing of the fire symbolised the beginning of the deceased’s nocturnal journey through the netherworld.³⁰

Finally, the mummy was returned to his protective coffins and processed from the court to the entrance of the burial shaft. Once manoeuvred into the proper burial chamber, the priests dragged it into the final location (Assmann 2005: 328). The chamber was then closed and sealed; the shaft filled to protect the burial (Teeter 2011: 147). Vessels involved in serving the funerary meal, as well as those providing food and drink in the arbours, were at various points during the ceremonies shattered intentionally and left in or around the tomb (Ritner 2008: 145–7; Martin 1989: 101). Some of the ceramic vessels could have been smashed on the stone-paved floors of the open court,³¹ the piercing sounds part of an execration act thought to offer protection at moments of transition like death (Winlock and Arnold 2010).³² The funerary event completed, the mourners descended from the high desert escarpment and ferried back across the Nile.

5.2 Elite Mortuary Cults at Saqqara

While the procession and funeral must have served as the most dramatic event related to the death of an elite community member, the ritualised relationship between the living and the deceased was far from complete at the cemetery. Most impactful was the continued mortuary cult, led by specialised priests, who (ideally) daily and in tandem with seasonal festival occasions, visited the open tomb chapel to chant or sing aloud a series of recitations.³³ The liturgies were intended to entice the ba of the tomb owner to return briefly from the netherworld and receive sustenance, engender the effective power of the deceased, and aid him on his transition to the netherworld. Theoretically the son of the deceased tomb owner acted as main officiant, but professional priests, family, and friends may have also participated in various ways.³⁴ Purification rituals were performed, including censing and the presenting of fragrant oils, which would have filled the small chapels in the rear of the temple-tombs with strong scent. The priests made invocations to the dead, pouring water on a stone table with offerings represented, the libation action activating their power (Hays 2010; Assmann 2005: 244, 330–32, 348; Willems 2001; O’Neill 2015: 58–59). A wall relief in the central chapel of the tomb of Amenemone shows the owner’s son making an invocation offering to his father, the text inscribed before his image stating:

Words spoken by his son, the Scribe of the Treasury Ptahmose, true of voice: Take to yourself an offering of provisions, libations, incense, offerings consisting of offering loaves of your god of your city… May they give you invocation offerings of bread, beer, oxen, fowl, libations, wine, milk, all good and pure things upon which a god lives; may you breathe air with myrrh and incense when one summons (to a meal) in the great place; may you eat bread and food offerings, namely that which the great gods give you; may you hear the voice when the offerings are announced, when giving the food offering to its lord; may you see the lord when he goes forth at the appearance of the god for his city. Your real heart belongs to you, your heart of being on earth…” (Ockinga et al. 2004: 55 and pl. 12, line numbers removed).

It was the sound of the priest’s voice, the distinguishing of his words by the dead, and the flow of the water that made this practice, which went back as far at least as the Old Kingdom, effective (Assmann 2005: 330–32, 348). Finally, protective rituals, likely the breaking of vessels, concluded some rituals (Willems 2001). In the Old Kingdom at least, the words would have been accompanied by the alternating beating of the priest’s breast with his fists, creating a type of ‘corporal music’ that Assman interpreted as expressing ‘emotion at the presence of a superhuman power’, here, the empowered dead (2005: 243). Middle Kingdom coffin texts interpreted as mortuary liturgy suggest that some oral spells were highly repetitive, to demarcate them aurally as distinct from regular speech (Willems 2001: 368).

Imagined thus as dwelling within the tomb, and maintaining their capacities to hear, breathe, taste and see, the sensory experience of the dead must be considered in structuring experience in the necropolis. Most of the New Kingdom Memphite temples, including the main temple of Ptah and the royal memorial temples nearby (whose locations remain yet undiscovered), have succumbed to the rising floodplain and modern development, and thus their ancient visual connection with Saqqara is not preserved in modern times. 3D GIS viewshed studies, which calculate all aspects of a 3D space that would have been visible and not visible from a single observer point (computationally taking into account building heights and shape, terrain topography, and any natural or built forms that would have obstructed the view of the observer), suggest the Memphite temples would originally have maintained high prominence from the area of the New Kingdom tombs. That the dead desired to ‘see the god’ is clear from contemporary texts (discussed above), and I have elsewhere argued that the southern groups of New Kingdom tombs were positioned to allow the deceased to maintain a visual connection with the temple of the god or the contemporary divinized king (Sullivan 2020). Visual links to the royal memorial temple could have been especially desirable, as the king was officially the official patron of mortuary offerings, distributing them to the houses of the gods and eventually reverting to the deceased in the necropolis (Strudwick 2005: 31–32).

The mechanisms of the dead’s sight were not defined; potentially through their mobile ba spirit, which could leave the tomb and ascend to the sky (Assmann 2005: 90–94). The stones capping the small mud-brick or stone-faced pyramids, positioned directly above or behind the cult chapel seem to have acted as one conduit for sacred vision for the deceased, as a number of examples at Saqqara included sculpted figures of the tomb owner (and sometimes his wife) kneeling and praising the sun.³⁵ The imagery was carved on the west and east sides of the pyramidion, placing the dead to directly face the rising and setting sun each day. The inscribed text on the east face of the pink granite capstone of Iniuia makes an explicit request for sacred vision:

An offering which the King gives (to) Re-Horakhte, the Great God, Lord of the sky, may he give that one sees his beauty when he rises, to the Osiris, the King's Scribe, the Steward, Iniuia, justified, of Memphis” (Schneider et al. 2012: 78).

The position of these objects, five or more metres above ground level, at the highest point of the tomb, would have also offered excellent ‘sight-lines’ to the temples of Memphis on the flood plain to the east (Figs. 5 and 6).

Fig. 5

(Left) 3D model render of the interior court of the New Kingdom tomb of Iniuia at Saqqara with the suggested position of the red and black granite capstone on the mud-brick pyramid superstructure indicated, render by the author in e-on Vue software; (Right) cropped digital photo of the west face of the pyramidion of Iniuia now in the Louvre museum (D 14), image courtesy of WikiMedia Commons, under a CC BY-SA 2.0 FR license: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Louvres-antiquites-egyptiennes-img_2865.jpg

Fig. 6

3D analysis of visibility showing elements that would be blocked (red) and visible (green) from an observer point at the centre of the pyramidion of Iniuia looking towards known (Ptah temple, background) and hypothetical (royal memorial temples, foreground) New Kingdom temples at Memphis represented by New Kingdom-style pylons (~25 m in height), analysis performed by the author in CityEngine 2018.0

The topography of the necropolis may therefore have been arranged in order to facilitate sacred vision, an aspect no doubt observable to the living approaching or leaving the tombs for funerary or mortuary cult performance, but designed to serve the sensory desires of the dead emerging out from the tomb.

6 Conclusion

Scholars have defined ritual as the physical expression of social concepts about the sacred and the divine (Barrowclough and Malone 2007: 1–2). Ritual actions were repeatedly performed and concretized through highly specialised architectural forms at Saqqara in ways creating the potential for significant sensory stimulation. The recurring events and their sensory signatures were an important means of demarcating the funerary landscape as a special form of ‘sacred space’. That these experiences were repeated over and over at various locations across the cemetery by a variety of people is clear, and these would have constituted the sounds, smells and sights that most characterised the necropolis landscape for the living. The dead too were imagined to tangibly benefit from these powerful sensations, but desired additional sensory capacities, to be able to look outward and see the god (or king in divinized form) from the tomb.

In this work, I have argued that although the artistic and textual record provides tremendous information on human experience at the necropolis, some vital elements of that experience—specifically the physical and visual impact of related monumental architecture—must be sought elsewhere. Using 3D GIS technologies, this study visualised aspects of the site of Saqqara in the New Kingdom that are inaccessible today to the modern scholar. These include the original form, materials, and lighting effects of individual New Kingdom tombs, the many existing monuments spread across the landscape of the cemetery that time (those both newly constructed and then-ancient structures in a state of collapse or deflation), and the contemporary temples (whose positions are variously known and still hypothetical) at the neighbouring site of Memphis. This digital material was directly integrated within the larger sensory discussion, to avoid isolating conclusions based on the digital from more traditional historical sources. Using the 3D visualisations and 3D viewshed calculations, I suggested ways that the physical space of the elite New Kingdom monuments, as well as views of royal monuments at Saqqara and Memphis, shaped embodied experience of the living, offered sacred sight-lines to the dead, and imbued places with a sense of ‘perpetuity’. 3D GIS visualisations thus create new opportunities for archaeologists to consider complex spatial and temporal elements of sites, and I argue that the digital can operate profitably in service of sensory examinations. I do not see a conflict between the empirical nature of GIS and the subjective aspects of sensory studies. Instead, the embedded nature of GIS data in real locations at an archaeological site, and the expansive capacities of 3D to help us extend beyond the limiting two dimensions of GIS, can help us ground our speculative work more firmly in the material remains of the landscape. We cannot replicate the experiences of past peoples, but we can harness digital technologies to help us more rigorously reimagine the places and conditions in which those experiences were generated.

This case study has focused specifically on the New Kingdom at Saqqara, drawing cautiously on sources from other sites or time periods. Indeed, the funerary landscape at Saqqara changed continually over time, and the sensory experience of a New Kingdom Egyptian would not have aligned seamlessly with one in the Late or Ptolemaic Periods. Although much of the ancient architecture of Saqqara would have remained to shape movement and visual impressions, dramatic changes took place at the necropolis. Huge structures for the burial of millions of mummified cult animals were erected, including temples and facilities for priests and pilgrims. The area of the monumental New Kingdom tombs was repurposed for lower- and non-elite burials, and mummification workshops popped-up around the tombs themselves. Pilgrims visited and slept in the temple of the Greek Asklepieion, hoping to receive divine messages through dreams (Bagnall and Rathbone 2004). New smells, sounds, and sights would have characterised the landscape as the nature of the site shifted. One of the main strengths of using digital landscape visualisations is their facility in showing multiple past moments in time, highlighting the complex histories of ancient places, which remind us that human experiences would have transformed in tandem with the spaces they inhabited.