In her discussion of the garden shrines at Amarna, Salima Ikram refers to the fact that they only appear in association with medium-sized or large houses and were ‘probably built by important and rich officials’ who wished to demonstrate their loyalty, wealth, and piety in a public, or at least semi-public, arena.696 She does not mention the possibility that the shrines, whose size and complexity she notes hardly relate to that of the houses with which they belong, could also have been used by the occupants of nearby houses as a communal place of worship.697 In designating the shrines as places of Aten worship through the medium of the royal family, Ikram698 does not take into account the presence of inscribed material and artefacts indicative of other religious beliefs and practices, such as the disc with horns from the inner court of Chapel 529, and the stelae from Chapel 525 dedicated to the god Shed.699 Each chapel at Amarna originally had a T-shaped water basin, considered by Peet and Woolley to be for purification purposes,700 though Bomann701 concludes that it was ‘primarily associated with the funerary cult.’ While it is not depicted as a washing vessel, it is commonly shown being used by the deceased, his wife, and their bas as a source of drinking water.702
Lynn Meskell suggests that the area at Deir el-Medina between the Ptolemaic temple enclosure and the northernmost village wall ‘represents a liminal zone, incorporating rituals for the living and the dead’.703 This sector contained a group of independent private chapels (Xnw)704 dating mostly to the 19th and 20th Dynasties with one or two courtyards, benches, and columns or pillars.705 Artefacts found in the vicinity of the chapels and their courtyards include statues, stelae, offering tables, basins, cultic pottery, portable altars, offering bowls, incense vessels, unguent vases, and amphorae for water, wine, oil, honey, and beer.706 Some chapels possessed ovens707 708 indicating that preparation of food took place in forecourts, perhaps on feast days. In the lower strata of Chapel 561 naturally occurring flint nodules were found that resembled worked objects; one of them incised with the hieroglyph wii.2228 Bomann believes that these may have been offerings to a deity or ancestors.709 At the Mirgissa shrine dedicated to Hathor, depositions of natural stones with ‘arresting nodular shapes’ suggesting fat or pregnant women and phalli were discovered; Kemp and Pinch,710 propose that such objects were considered as suitable votive offerings to the gods.711 A painted flint ‘pregnant’ female figure712 may have derived from a house, tomb, or chapel, deposited as a votive object with the intention of increasing the prospects of conception through the intercession of the gods or the dead, or in gratitude at an incident-free pregnancy and birth, as may also have been the case with female figurines. Flint objects of this type can still be found in the Theban desert, and are sometimes collected by locals as good luck charms.713
In Bomann’s study of the private chapels at the workmen’s village at Amarna,714 there is an implicit assumption that unless these were obviously given over entirely to the worship of deities, they were all at least partly dedicated to cults of the dead. However, only the occasional unfinished shaft in proximity to a tomb might directly link any of the chapels to an ancestor cult. Stevens715 believes that the chapels probably served ancestor cults because they were situated close to a small cemetery, as well as having the tomb shafts and decoration that ‘communicated themes appropriate to ancestor worship’. At Deir el-Medina at least eight anthropoid busts were excavated from the northern area of the votive chapels and temples, with three found in the vicinity of Chapel 1213, and two to the south of the Ptolemaic temple.236 Akh iqer en re stelae have also been found in votive chapels at Deir el-Medina.237
Chapel G in the south-western group on the path between Deir el-Medina and the Valley of the Queens may have been intended to perpetuate the cult of a man called Amenmose, whose name was erased and whose smashed offering table was unearthed in the pit and chamber below the vaulted shrine.238 Niches in the decorated hall once held stelae, possibly including an akh iqer stela. The damage could be indicative of some form of execration ritual or damnatio memoriae for the owner (see Chapter 5). Chapel F contained a burial chamber and niches for more than a dozen private stelae. Sadek239 states that it may have been a re-used tomb chapel but equally, given the precedent of honouring certain individuals within the community, such as those to whom several akh iqer stelae were dedicated, it might have been the tomb chapel of a particularly venerated local official that later became a shrine.240
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