Just published by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston:


GIZA MASTABAS
Edited by Peter Der Manuelian and William Kelly Simpson
=09
Vol. 6
A Cemetery of Palace Attendants=20
by Ann Macy Roth=09
ISBN 0-87846-385-2

13 1/4" x 10 1/2"
203 pages  of text
91 figures in text
303 black and white photographs and 3 color photographs on 130 pages of
photographic plates
80 pages of epigraphic line drawing plates
1 quadtone frontispiece

Cost: $100
To order (orders CAN NOT be taken at the above email address!), please=20
contact:

VAN SICLEN BOOKS
111 Winnetka Road
San Antonio, Texas 78229-3613
Tel. (210) 522-1353=09=20
Fax (210) 522-1081


Description of the volume:

At the northern edge of the Western Cemetery, in the shadow of the
great Fourth-Dynasty pyramids at Giza, lies a cluster of twenty-five
Fifth-Dynasty mastaba tombs. Between 1936 and 1939, these tombs were
excavated by an expedition from Harvard University and the Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston, under the direction of George Andrew Reisner. As
part of a continuing project to publish the results of Reisner's
excavations, expeditions from the Museum of Fine Arts returned to the
cluster in 1987, 1989, and 1990 to record the decoration and
architecture of these tombs. The results of this work have been
combined with the documentation left by Reisner's expedition to
produce a full archaeological description of the tombs and an analysis
of their history.  Two circumstances make this cluster particularly
valuable for the study of the process of Old Kingdom tomb building and
cemetery control. First, there were two apparent changes in the
direction of access to the cluster. The tombs themselves show the
scars of these shifts: doorways have been moved, porticos and
courtyards have been added, and walls have been encased in new
masonry.  As a result, even undecorated tombs can be dated on the
basis of their relationship to their neighbors. The shifts in
orientation also suggest that the old roy al cemetery at Giza was
still under some sort of state authority. The second important
characteristic of the cluster also reflects this state control.

Burial

in the area was apparently restricted to people who served the king in
the hierarchy of palace attendants (khenty-she). Since this hierarchy
is = well known, it is possible to explore the degree to which rank at
court affected various features of the tombs in a controlled
chronological framework. The correlations that result suggest initial
hypotheses for relating the form and position of a tomb to the life
history of its owner.  Although the interest of this cluster of tombs
lies largely in its architecture and constructional history, the
publication of the relief decoration of several of its chapels also
makes an important addition to the corpus of relief art and
inscriptions from the Old Kingdom period. New examples are presented
of rar= e scenes, such as bed-making, copulating desert fauna, a
carrying-chair scene, and a scene of punishment in the marshes. Four
chapters analyzing the cluster as a whole are followed by a catalogue
of the individual tombs, describing and discussing their excavation,
architecture, decoration, inscriptions, and associated finds. The
text, which contains almost a hundred illustrative figures, is
followed by over two hundred photographic plates and epigraphic
drawings.