Conclusions

As Valerie Hope notes in her discussion of memory and funerary monuments in ancient Rome:180

In the end all these attempts to stimulate the public to remember reflect [the fact] that human memory is a weak and fickle thing; most people forget as easily as they remember and what they remember is subjective and open to manipulation. The very fact that some individuals went to such lengths to be remembered suggests that they were all too aware of how quickly people both forget and are forgotten.

Equally, however, it could be argued that while the individual may be forgotten, mortuary monuments still function as reminders of the collective dead and of the omnipresence of death itself.181 Curses are a testament to the fact that the Egyptians recognised that vandalism, theft, desecration of corpses, and reuse of tombs and artefacts occurred and was largely beyond the scope of terrestrial law. These concerns are reflected in other societies, including the Romans who sought to ‘gain protection against the wanton forgetfulness and destructive nature of the living’, some by making their tombs a focal point for visits, banquets and entertainment and providing money for their maintenance, while others built shared tombs so that future generations would have an interest in preserving them.182 Ultimately these tactics were as unsuccessful as the threats inscribed in Egyptian tombs.

Deceased children may not have received the same level of mortuary provision as adults but they were nonetheless buried in ways indicative of their importance to their families and the community of which they were a part. The division of cemeteries into age-related sectors has been interpreted as the rejection of juveniles from society,183 but the fact that infants and neonates were given individual burials, sometimes with grave goods, rather than being discarded or placed together in pits implies that they were not thought of as sub-human.

Egyptian attitudes to the dead may be best described as ambivalent. As powerful ancestors the deceased could intercede between petitioners and the gods, restore fertility and protect the home. Equally, as malevolent spirits they could cause disease and death, destroy crops, and disrupt the household.184 Yet neither respect nor fear were sufficient to prevent tomb robbery, the desecration of corpses, or the reuse of funerary equipment. Ironically, the emphasis on the need for material objects in securing a place in the afterlife may have been partly responsible for the theft and ‘usurpation’ of artefacts and monuments. For those interred with grave goods, particularly the elite, inequality in life led to greater vulnerability in death.

180

181

182

183

2003: 120.

Cf. Parker Pearson 1999: 193. Hope 2003: 122-3.

E. g. Lillehammer 2002: 78ff. See Chapter 1.