Following Petrie’s excavations on the Umm el-Qaab, the royal tombs of the First and late Second Dynasty kings were recognised as the burial places of these rulers. The tombs with their accompanying subsidiary burials and pairs of funerary stelae spoke unequivocally of their occupants’ royal status. Then, in the two decades following 1936, Emery excavated the Early Dynastic cemetery at North Saqqara with its massive mudbrick mastabas. The impressive size and architecture of the North Saqqara tombs led scholars to question the identification of the smaller tombs on the Umm el-Qaab (Lauer 1957:156). Emery, in particular, was in no doubt that the North Saqqara mastabas were the true burial places of the First Dynasty kings. He interpreted the tombs on the Umm el-Qaab as southern ‘cenotaphs’, dummy Upper Egyptian counterparts to the ‘true’ burials in Lower Egypt, reflecting the duality of Egyptian kingship (Emery 1961). Thus began a protracted scholarly debate over the proper interpretation of the two cemetery areas, the Umm el-Qaab and North Saqqara (cf. Hoffman 1980:280-7). Since the debate focused on many of the crucial aspects of early royal mortuary architecture, it is of interest and importance for the history of Egyptology and its appreciation of the Early Dynastic period.
The detailed arguments for both sides of the debate have been presented in detail elsewhere (especially Lauer 1957 and Stadelmann 1985 in favour of Saqqara as the royal burial ground; Kemp 1967 and Kaiser 1992 in favour of Abydos), and it is not necessary to rehearse them again here. Recent excavations at Abydos have strengthened the case for identifying this site as the First Dynasty royal necropolis. In particular, Aha’s tomb complex on the Umm el-Qaab seems to have been built somewhat later than mastaba S3357 at North Saqqara, to judge from the ceramic evidence. The time-lag between the two tomb complexes argues against the notion that the Saqqara monument is the true burial of the king and the Abydos complex merely his southern cenotaph (Dreyer 1990:65; cf. Helck 1984b: 394-8). The case for identifying the tombs at Abydos as the true royal burials is increasingly convincing. The combination of tomb and funerary enclosure at Abydos provides a logical ancestry for the Third Dynasty Step Pyramid complex (Kaiser and Dreyer 1982:259). It is generally accepted that ‘the kings were buried at Abydos and that the tombs at Saqqara were for high officials or members of the royal family’ (Kemp 1967:23), although one scholar, in a reversal of Emery’s argument, has identified the Saqqara tombs as northern cenotaphs (Hoffman 1980:287). The belief that the true royal burials of the First and Second Dynasties were located at Saqqara, though steadfastly maintained by a few scholars (principally Lauer 1969, 1988; Brinks 1979; Stadelmann 1987), is now firmly ‘a minority view’ (O’Connor 1991:7).
World History
