The city of the dead or: the making of a cultural geography

Abstract

: Saqqara was the necropolis of the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis, a centre of major political and religious importance throughout Pharaonic history. Kings as well as commoners choose to be buried here from the earliest times on-wards, resulting in the first monumental stone building (the Step Pyramid complex of King Djoser, c. 2600 BCE) and a myriad of other smaller, non-royal tombs. From the New Kingdom to the Late Period (c. 1500 – 332 BCE), Egyptian kings were buried elsewhere, but Saqqara remained an important cultic area and nu-merous monumental tombs, funerary temples and shrines were built there until the end of ancient Egyptian history. Yet we still know little about how people dealt with organised religion in day to day practice and how things may have changed over time. Having served as a memorial site for non-royal individuals and kings, as well as a centre for the worship of gods for millennia, Saqqara not only provides chronological depth, but also the necessary thematic breadth to study the ways in which religion changed and impacted on the physical environment and contemporary society, and how, in turn, contemporary society and restrictions and possibilities offered by the environment shaped the site ’ s dy-namic cultural geography.