The very earliest burial places survive as little more than scoopings in the desert gravel; they may have once been covered by low mounds of sand or gravel, with no evidence for more substantial provision. Graves of the Badarian and Naqada I Periods are generally oval or circular, with the body placed in a foetal pose, with the head to the south. By Naqada II, the design of the grave becomes more rectangular, with the orientation of the body generally reversed to face west, the reverse of the practice in historic times.
By late Naqada II times, larger tombs at such sites as Abydos, Naqada itself, and Hierakonpolis were becoming brick-lined with, in some cases, a cross-wall dividing the subterranean cavity into a burial chamber and an ante - or store-chamber. Amongst those at Hierakonpolis is Tomb 100, the walls of which were adorned with scenes of boats and hunting, comprising the first known decorated tomb in Egypt (Case and Payne 1962; Kemp 1973).
Such open-cut brick-lined substructures form a standard feature of most tombs of late Predynastic and Early Dynastic Periods, the main distinguishing feature being the number of rooms into which the overall cavity is divided. Particularly large examples are found at Abydos at Umm el-Qaab, where they represent the first identifiable royal tombs. The earliest of these, U-j, apparently belongs to a late Preynastic (Dynasty ‘‘0’’) king named Scorpion, and comprises a central chamber surrounded by a number of subsidiary rooms (Dreyer 1998). A sequence of similar structures is found there for each of the kings of the First Dynasty, with a series of innovations appearing with time (Petrie 1901). In particular, from the reign of Den, a stairway was added, allowing access to the interior after the roofing-over of the chambers with wood, and thus facilitating the building of a superstructure.
However, it appears that a low mound was constructed directly above the roof of the substructure, perhaps representing the primeval mound upon which the Creator first manifested himself. This mound (also found in some contemporary private tombs at Saqqara) may not have been visible above the ground surface. The only certain markers of the tomb were a pair of stelae, each bearing the name of the king, between which were presumably placed offerings to the dead king’s spirit; this arrangement was the ancestor of later, far more elaborate, royal mortuary temples.
The First Dynasty royal tombs were also surrounded by the brick-lined graves of retainers, both male and female. All indications suggest that these individuals were buried at the same time as the king; no signs of violence were found on the bodies, and it would appear that they voluntarily went to their deaths to accompany their king in the next world. The numbers of such graves drop off rapidly from the middle of the dynasty onwards, and there is no evidence whatever for the practice after the end of the Early Dynastic Period.
In addition to these burial structures at Umm el-Qaab, most kings from the reign of Aha onwards built a great mud-brick enclosure some 2 km to the east of their actual tombs, close to edge of the cultivation and overlooking the wadi that led up to Umm el-Qaab. Few traces survive to indicate what may have lain within, while in some cases the enclosure was surrounded by the graves of royal retainers. All but the very latest, the Second Dynasty enclosure of Khasekhmemwy, were later dismantled, suggesting that the enclosures’ role in the mortuary cult was ephemeral and perhaps restricted to the funeral itself (O’Connor et al. 1989, 2009: 159-81).
Private tombs of the First Dynasty take a rather different form. Although substructure development is similar, superstructures are wholly different, taking the form of mastabas, with elaborately paneled brick outer surfaces. The earliest examples were divided internally into storage compartments, roofed with wood and rubble, but later - presumably for security reasons - were simply ofrubble within a thick brick retaining wall. In some cases, a mound was constructed directly above the substructure, within the mastaba, presumably akin to that found above royal tombs. In an exceptional example (S3038) this mound had a stepped skin of brick (Emery 1949-58: I, 82-94).
It is likely that from the outset the offering place was represented by one of the niches at the left-hand end of the eastern facade, although it is not until the reign of Qaa (tomb of Merka, S3505) that a funerary stela is found in this location (Emery 1949-58: III, 5-36). From then onwards, slab-stelae showing the deceased in front of a table of offerings become increasingly common.
The Second Dynasty marks a number of changes in tomb architecture at Saqqara, which now became, for a period, the royal cemetery. Substructures now moved to a tunneled design along a straight north-south axis, off of which store-chambers open. In some tombs (e. g. that of Ruaben, S2302), the innermost chambers were configured to recall a house, with the burial in a niche in the west wall of a ‘‘bedroom,’’ with one of the nearby rooms representing a lavatory (Quibell 1923: 12-13, 29). Protection for the tomb was in the form of a series of stone portcullis slabs lowered from the surface. Such portcullises had first appeared singly during the First Dynasty and were lowered from above via shafts that penetrated both the bedrock and the superstructure above.
The superstructures of Second Dynasty private tombs at Saqqara follow on from First Dynasty practice and lie within the same cemetery at north Saqqara, although the previously seen paneling is now by no means universal. The royal tombs at Saqqara lay around a kilometre to the south west, creating a clear cordon sanitaire between them and the commoners’ sepulchres. Almost nothing survives of the superstructures of the tombs of Hotepsekhemwy and Ninetjer, but the former has a substructure that is essentially an expanded version of contemporary private tombs, while the latter is much less regular in plan (Kaiser 1995). Two very large rectangular enclosures, one of rubble and one of stone (the ‘‘L-shaped Enclosure’’ and the Gisr el-Mudir: Mathieson et al. 1997) that lie in the desert of the west may represent the Saqqara equivalents of the Abydos royal enclosures. Pottery seems to date the second of them to the Second Dynasty, while they lie at the end of the principal ancient approach to the Saqqara necropolis, which was then from the north, rather than the east, as was later sometimes the case. Association of these two enclosures with the two known Second Dynasty royal tombs, therefore, seems not unlikely, especially given the requirement for such enclosures seen with all the Abydene royal tombs.
Towards the end of the dynasty royal tombs moved back temporarily to Abydos, broadly resuming First Dynasty practice, although the latest tomb, that of Khasekhemwy, is of considerably larger size, and in some ways recalls the Saqqara royal burial places in design. Its accompanying enclosure, the Shunet ez-Zebib, was the only one not to be dismantled in antiquity and displays a paneled exterior design that was probably also present in the now destroyed earlier enclosures.
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