Ahmose also built monuments at a number of other sites traditionally favoured by kings, including Abydos, the major site of Osiris’s cult. These remains, currently being excavated and analysed by Stephen Harvey during the 1990s, are known to have included pyramid monuments as well as temples. Abydos had long been a site that honoured Osiris and the royal ancestors who had merged with Osiris at their deaths. Pyramids were used to mark the Theban tombs of the 17th Dynasty kings, and their brick remains may still have been visible in the Theban region of Dra Abu el-Naga as recendy as the nineteenth century. Although the body of Ahmose was found in the royal mummy cache at Deir el-Bahri (see below), the location of his tomb remains unknown.
Ahmose’s mother, Ahhotep, was almost certainly buried in the Theban cemetery, as were kings and queens from earlier in the dynasty. Excavation in the region during the 1990s has focused on what may be one of these royal tombs, and, although no certain evidence yet exists, Daniel Polz’s work at Dra Abu el-Naga has shown the continuity of this north Theban cemetery from the 17th to the early i8th Dynasty. He has also demonstrated the existence of elite tomb clusters (each comprising smaller graves scattered around a large tomb), in which single freestanding cult structures may have been shared by several adjacent graves. These clusters of graves are located on the desert floor beneath the Dra Abu el-Naga hills, just south of the entrance to the Valley of the Kings. The royal tombs, some of which were perhaps reused Middle Kingdom chapels, are cut into the hills themselves, overlooking the lesser graves.
So far, the archaeological evidence suggests that funerary wealth was indeed curtailed in the 17th Dynasty, and that decorated tombs were almost unknown in Thebes at this time. Still, the practice of clustering the graves of the elite and the slightly less wealthy beneath royal burial places, despite recalling the old practice of burying followers near the king, may also reflect some new organizational pattern (although without further study it is impossible to conclude more). It is interesting to point out in this regard, however, that in the Saqqara region a non-royal cemetery of the time of Ahmose and Amenhotep I consisted of surface graves, described as rich. Since the burial places of the highest officials of these two reigns (viziers, high priests, treasurers) are largely unknown, identifying the patterns of cemetery development could ultimately help to locate missing tombs. Such work has already been undertaken by Geoffrey Martin and Martin Raven in central Saqqara south of Unas’ causeway, and by Alain Zivie in North Saqqara.
The bodies of some rulers and the coffins and funerary equipment of others were moved from their original locations in antiquity (and perhaps also in more recent times). Priests of the late New Kingdom and early Third Intermediate Period reburied some royal mummies in a tomb near Deir el-Bahri, where the mummies of Ahmose and Seqenenra Taa (c.1560 bc) were found, both placed in non-royal coffins of slightly later date. The large outer coffin of Ahmose’s mother, Ahhotep, made probably at the time of her death (perhaps as late as the reign of Amenhotep I), was also found in the cache, although her inner coffin (presuming both belonged to a single queen named Ahhotep) was found earlier in what may have been her tomb. It contained objects naming both Ahmose and Kamose. The area of Dra Abu el-Naga continued for centuries to be associated with the royal family of Ahmose and with Ahhotep and Ahmose-Nefertari particularly, and later Ramessid tombs, chapels, and stelae in the region venerated their memory.
The cemetery area itself changed dramatically, however, after the early i8th Dynasty. Once royal tombs were no longer being constructed at Dra Abu el-Naga, it retained its status as the most elite portion of the Theban necropolis only for another thirty years or so, up to the reign of Hatshepsut (1473-1458 bc). With the establishment of the Valley of the Kings as the royal burial ground, a few elite burials began to be placed in Sheikh Abd el-Quma, the line of hills to the south of Deir el-Bahri. The clusters of valley shaft tombs, largely without chapel structures, followed the movement of the cemetery southward, and through the reign of Hatshepsut, and into that of Thutmose III (1479-1425 bc), shafts were dug into Deir el-Bahri and the Asasif to make family tombs of one or more chambers similar to those at Dra Abu el-Naga. With the sudden increase of wealth held by the elite in the later reign of Thutmose III, this practice seems to have largely disappeared. Tomb-builders were kept busy excavating and decorating rock-cut tombs at Sheikh Abd el-Quma for the growing royal administration.
World History
