Chapter eight of Bard’s An Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt is an overview of the archaeology of the New Kingdom. Many pages focus on mortuary practices and what royal tombs of that time looked like, especially within the Valley of the Kings. Throughout the semester, I’ve found myself coming back over and over to the stratification in Egyptian society. Royalty and Nobles got their own large tomb complexes while common people shared tombs within their family. It’s hard for me personally to imagine how a society’s beliefs could contribute to such stark contrasts.
The Valley of the Kings, first occupied by Thutmose I, is a great example of how the working class continually drew the short end of the stick. Tombs in the Valley of the Kings were impressive feats of construction because they were underground, hidden from grave robbers. The workers who built those impressive mausoleums were buried in the nearby town Deir el-Medina, all within close proximity to one another. The difference in burial density has an inverse relationship with a person’s wealth, but in a day and age when wealth has very little to do with a person’s worth, I have a hard time imagining the people inside of and behind the building of each tomb.
Maybe in Ancient Egypt, a person’s worth was simply defined by how much they owned. I find that hard to believe, though, because one’s eligibility to the afterlife, the weighing of the heart, had nothing to do with the earthly possessions buried with them and everything to do with their soul. That’s the hard part about archaeology; as much as you may want to learn about the individuals and their motivations, at the end of the day you only have material goods on which to base your judgement. While those possessions, as part of a large pool of data, demonstrate trends and patterns, the variations of individuals are lost unless they and their actions are largely documented, like elites and nobles.
I guess what it comes down to is a person’s actions versus their possessions. Royalty had the privilege of wealth and power, so their lives and actions were documented, shedding light on the type of person they may have been regardless of the things that they owned. It’s easy to forget that beneath those rulers, there were hundreds of thousands of common people who go unnoticed because they weren’t buried with flashy gold artifacts. At the end of the day, though, their hearts would have been weighed against the same feather as those they called King.
I agree that within archaeology and ancient Egypt studies its easy to forgot the working class people. Because the pharaohs were buried with such flashy and extravagant grave goods, Egyptologists and archaeologists today tend to focus more on their burial. Obviously there is a lot to be learned by looking at the burials of working people as they were the majority of the population but they often get over shadowed. I don’t know enough about ancient Egyptian religion to speak of how the common people were supposed to have their heart weighed to enter the afterlife, but I’m sure that information exists somewhere out there. Also I don’t think that a persons worth was defined by how much owned per say in ancient Egypt but more so of what family they were born into. Ancient Egypt was a society based on stratification and the basis of stratification was birthright, hence why there was centuries of pharaohs all from the same family.
The unfortunate part of archaeology like you said is that there is a lot of information lost to history. We obviously do not know everything about ancient Egyptian life or society because a lot of it was not documented.
I think like a lot of us the mortuary practices of ancient Egypt are one of the most interesting things to learn and study. I think that it is so hard to imagine because it is something we have never had to really deal we all nowadays have pretty much the same mortuary practices. Although not everyone is buried the same way it is the families’ choice not because of social status. On a side note I liked how you said they “drew the short end of the stick” when referring to the working class but it is true! I think that they put so much effort into something that they will never benefit from. I do believe that it is in relation to a persons wealth and I agree that those factors had very little to do with a persons worth. Even now with the poor they get treated poorly. And it is hard to imagine because we are so privileged there are a lot of people that are out there that do not get the things they deserve just like the common people in ancient Egypt. I think that the hardest part about archaeology is the fact that we will never for sure know why they did things or what they thought. That is why we continuously study to learn these things because we can suggest what we think they were thinking or what they knew back then but, I also think that is what makes Archaeology interesting.