Maarten J. Raven

René van Walsem

Willem F. M. Beex

Amanda Dunsmore

Ladislava Horáčková

This funerary monument of a high Memphite official was discovered by a joint expedition of the Leiden Museum of Antiquities and Leiden University in 2001. Meryneith started his career as steward of the Memphite temple of the sun god Aten during the reign of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten. During midlife, he may have joined the court set up by the Pharaoh at the new capital at Amarna. He ended his career under Tutankhamun as high-priest of the Aten in the Memphite temple again. Thereby, the importance of the tomb of Meryneith lies in the fact that for the first time it allows us to witness various stages in the rise and fall of the Amarna heresy from a Memphite point of view. Thus the tomb-owner was apparently forced to change his name from Meryneith - with its reference to the now proscribed goddess Neith - into Meryre. Several other variants of his name and some additional titles came to light, revealing various stages in his career. These stages mirror the ideological developments of the Amarna Period and its immediate aftermath, which are further illustrated by the different styles of the decoration of the tomb. This proved to be remarkably well preserved and consists of both wall-reliefs and paintings on mud plaster. Thanks to the evidence of the inscriptions, it can be observed how the tomb was built and decorated in various stages, each characterized by a marked change in style and iconography. The present report includes a full description of these wall scenes, as well as chapters on the career of the tomb-owner, on the double statue of Meryneith and his wife found in one of the west chapels, and on the objects, pottery, and skeletal material found in the course of the excavations.

The Tomb of Meryneith at Saqqara

What is presented here is a preliminary crystallization of thinking about questions, problems, and aspects that presented themselves during research into the iconography of Old Kingdom elite tombs in the so-called Leiden Mastaba Project (LMP), started in 1980 for teaching advanced students. Since the Egyptian culture has been given shape mainly in connection with the residences of the kings, the elite tombs of the Memphite area only were incorporated into the database. The original paper database consists of individual files on each tomb, giving a plan, wall scheme, a concise description of each sub-theme and its accompanying texts (if present). For details on the set-up, the original questions, the intention and some preliminary results on the partially collected material in 1985, see Van Walsem, Mastaba project. The core of this essay is a combination of and an elaboration of two former lectures by the author entitled: "Some un(der)exposed aspects in the study and interpretation of mastaba scenes" and "Religious iconography of Ancient Egypt: methodological and theoretical problems".

René van Walsem

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