Tombs, stelae, statues and busts served as mnemonic devices, along with rituals and, to a lesser extent, texts; people needed to be reminded of the past and their place in relation to it as a means of maintaining social cohesion.859 The transformation of Egyptian temples and tombs into places of Christian worship860 constitutes an example of the active confrontation of the past,861 and a means of rendering potentially dangerous places harmless:862
What lay beyond the known - in this case, Christian - world was perceived as heathen, barbaric, chaotic and demonic. It had to be purified and incorporated through ritual activities which would order the chaotic, and civilise, purify and domesticate the wilderness, Christianizing it. Indigenous spiritual beings were often incorporated into Christian iconography by recasting them as devils and demons.
Thus the ambivalent akh (pl. akhu) becomes ‘demon’ in Coptic. Robert Demaree distinguishes between akhu ‘deceased’ and akhu ‘demon-like entities’,863 but this may reflect ambivalence towards the dead: the deceased may behave in a demon-like manner if wronged in some way.
In most cases Egyptians seem to have actively reduced the burden of the past864 by only including the names of their closest relatives in their tombs. There are exceptions, notably Paheri (Tomb 3 at Elkab; early 18th Dynasty), who incorporated five generations of his extended family in his tomb decoration. Besides his wife, children and grandchildren, his parents, siblings, mother’s brothers, wife’s father and mother, wife’s sisters and brothers, and his wife’s cousin are represented, while the adjacent tomb of his grandfather, Ahmose son of Ibana (Tomb 5), provides details of two further generations of the family.865 Inherkhau’s 20th Dynasty tomb at Deir el-Medina (TT 359) also records five generations of the owner’s family, from his greatgrandfather to his son.866 In an act of commemoration, a priest of Amun-Re listed thirteen generations of his family at the temple of Thutmose III at Deir el-Bahri.867 Listing or depicting non-immediate family members may be considered as a form of ancestor worship, ensuring that their names were not forgotten, but it also served as an indicator of the social position and background of the scribe or tomb owner.
Active remembrance in cultic form was not necessarily altruistic. Aside from fear of the dead, cult officiants, usually family members, benefited from reversion of offerings and the cult endowment.868 They were also depicted on stelae and might be interred in the dedicatee’s tomb; as David Jeffreys notes:869 ‘The observation of the cult was thus strengthened and might assure the post-mortem future of the entire household.’ The benefits of participation in cultic activities for the dead or the gods accrued mainly after death,870 but for those responsible for the burial of the deceased some rewards were more immediate: according to P. Bulaq X (recto, lines 10-11), the possessions of the dead were to be given to ‘him who buries’.871 Thus those who claim to have buried people with no immediate kin872 may not have been as philanthropic as they seem. Rubie Watson finds a similar relationship between property and the treatment of the dead in Southeastern China:873
The deceased’s chances of ‘survival ’ are greatly increased if he has left enough property to form an estate (tsu) in his name. With an estate the ancestor’s continued ‘existence ’no longer depends so completely on the vagaries of human memory or emotion. There is little doubt that the wealthy have a better chance of attaining immortality than do the poor.
Acts of burial and memorialisation were also a means of distancing society from the dead, providing a context for disposing of a corpse and preserving only selective memories of an individual. The transformation of a social person into a non-living entity involves the distillation of living people’s memories through a complex process of remembering and forgetting.874 A similar policy of ‘active forgetting’ was employed in medieval England, where those who were denied prime locations within the sacred space of a churchyard were ‘rapidly incorporated into strategies of forgetting that emphasized the communal dead.’875 Andrew Jones states that monuments by their material presence are repositories of memory,876 but these memories discriminate actively, depicting the tomb owner as a pillar of society,877 or, in cases of damnatio memoriae (see below), preserving a record of unrest and personal grievances.
World History
