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3-06-2015, 08:51

Separation and inclusion in burial-places

Individuals with severe skin conditions such as leprosy have not been recorded from cemeteries in Egypt 3000-525 BC, but the absence might merely reflect the rarity, even at Saharan desert edges, of ground conditions dry enough to preserve skin, compounded by very limited publication of larger populations. However, it remains possible that the ancient society excluded from its afterlife space any body with visible decay, because it insisted on the integrity of the body to its surface. In the most spectacular exception, the body of King Ramses V bears lesions typical of smallpox, a disease which would have been contagious enough to have killed his embalmers too (Fischer-Elfert 2005). However, the king may have been considered a different species: written and rarer pictorial sources emphasize that the king is born as a seed of the creator-god, implanted in a woman, and so not physically human (Berlev 2000). There is no similar written or visual source with direct comment on how ancient Egyptian society at different periods and places understood the processes of birth and growth for (other) human beings.

Returning to the primary evidence, the bodies themselves, cemeteries show little evidence for different treatment of individuals where the skeleton implies visible physical difference. At Rifa in Middle Egypt, one tomb (1900 Bc) included burials of two men, called Nakhtankh and Khnumnakht; the spine of Khnumnakht was irregular (from kyphoscoliosis according to medical analysis in 1908 and the 1970s), but there was no difference in external appearance after wrapping or in other features of burial equipment, including the three small statuettes inscribed for the men (David 2007).

Difference in childbirth and early infancy may have been considered divinely marked, as documented from two examples at different periods in the first millennium BC. At Beni Hasan, about 900 BC, an infant died of extreme brittle bone disease, where the bones would have broken at any move, and was buried in a unique small coffin adorned with the double plume and sun disk associated at that time with the god of the afterlife, Osiris (Dawson and Gray 1968, 13-14). In the second instance, in baboon catacombs at Tuna, somewhere within the time range 600-100 BC, one human infant burial showed anencephaly, a condition where part of the brain is not developed, causing death before or at birth (Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire 1822, 1826). At the neck was found an amulet in the form of a small baboon figurine, a form regularly used to depict Thoth, god of wisdom and of the region of

Tuna. The infant may have been buried among the mummified baboons, echoing their appearance and evoking Thoth himself, and therefore to be placed with them in terrain sacred to Thoth. The present location of body and figurine is unknown, and the early report on the find is vague, but the account is still a precious indication of one ancient treatment of a physical difference that would have been lethal at birth.



 

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