The balding men of Hathor introduce the dimension of human lifespan into the social concept of the sacred. In the archaeological record of ancient Egyptian cemeteries, the bodies of men, women, and children all seem to be treated as integral units to be preserved whole, even when the items placed with them might vary according to status, gender, and age. Yet, in this generalized 3000-525 Bc picture, where does this shared treatment begin and end in each human life? Was it considered as necessary to keep whole the fetus, infant, child, as well as the most elderly? Again, anthropology and sociology warn against assuming that all societies treat their youngest and oldest as core members of a society. Today, acute legal ethical debates arise over the point at which human life may begin and end. In urban centers across several industrialized nations, the most elderly often leave their homes to receive full-time care in special buildings. For ancient Egypt in its many periods and regions, general answers on life attitudes are hazardous. The archaeology of settlements in Egypt has been too limited to identify any separate spaces that might have been assigned to very young or very old. Too few larger cemeteries have been sufficiently carefully excavated and published to reach conclusions over the absence of infants and most elderly. The limited cemetery statistics have been used to establish average life expectancy, from twenties to forties, but any results need to allow for the possibility that these cemeteries may not include the youngest or oldest in a society. Cemeteries specially for the more elderly are not known to me, but there are examples of separate burial for the very young. One cemetery at Deir al-Madina (Waset, 1500-1400 Bc) housed mainly child burials, with some distinctive offerings (Meskell 1999, 161-168). Moreover, throughout the second millennium BC, infant burials occur in houses at settlement sites (Pilgrim 1996, see following section); this could explain why only one child less than a year old was among the 93 individuals in one better-documented cemetery at Saqqara (late second millennium BC, Bentley 1999). This may be a distinctive feature of ancient Egypt, as later sites offer different results; in the cemetery at Kellis in Dakhla Oasis, almost 100 of 700 burials from the early first millennium AD are fetal or infant burials (Tocheri 2005).
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Figure 2.8 (a) Scene depicting a woman using hairpins to arrange the hair of the king's
Wife Kawit, carved on the limestone sarcophagus of Kawit, Waset, about 2000 bc, now
World History
