7 Symbolism

Just as the paintings in the tomb were not simple depictions of flowers, food, animals, recreation and work activities, but also carriers of a supererogatory symbolic range of meaning concerning progress into the afterlife, so too the tomb itself was not merely a physical space into which the mummies were placed. Like a Christian church in the shape of a cross, it too had a symbolic dimension. The organisation of the space, no less than its painted decoration, represented the transition from life to death, or more accurately, from life into the afterlife.

Watch this video in which Richard Parkinson and Paul Wood talk about the purpose of tomb-chapels.

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INTERVIEWER:

You spoke about the paintings being taken from what you called a tomb-chapel. And I'm quite interested in this because, I mean, obviously, we encounter these pictures in an environment a little bit like an art gallery now, a museum, but they would originally have been made for something very different. And I know another common misconception about Egyptian art is that it's all to do with tombs and the dead, and yet, these are clearly meant to be seen by people? What are tomb-chapels?

RICHARD PARKINSON:

Yeah, we are entangled with these horrible stereotypes of Egypt as being mummies, myth, and magic, and all to do with death. The aspect of death is really to do with the cultic function of the tomb-chapel. Nebamun would have been buried, mummified in a chamber deep underground, but the space where these paintings were remained open for relatives, for family, for friends, even passers by. And it was a space where people would make offerings.

In this scene, you can just see the hand of Nebamun's son offering a bouquet. And there's Nebamun's leg and feet. People would come into the space to remember the dead Nebamun, to make offerings, to say prayers, and even to have feasts in honour, probably the time of the funeral, possibly once a year on the Day of the Dead. And they're the sort of banquets that you see on the walls of the tomb-chapel, where people are together, in couples, young single men, young single women. There's dancers, musicians. And there's an awful lot of wine. Wine is something that gets you drunk, that lessens the barriers between the lands of the dead and the lands of the living.

And that is what the tomb-chapel is about. It's communicating, remembering, interacting with the dead, and keeping them alive. And they're not meant to be gloomy spaces. The tomb-chapel chamber is probably no wider than this bay where the paintings are at the moment. You'd walk into it, you'd be surrounded by colour, by life. You'd hear the music, almost, on the walls. You'd see the words that the musicians are singing. You'd read Nebamun's titles.

It would be a very lively intimate space. It's sort of, it's often called a home for all eternity. So it really isn't Indiana Jones going into a dark dusty chamber with skeletons. It's exactly the opposite. It's keeping people alive.

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Melinda Hartwig, who has made a recent detailed study of Eighteenth Dynasty tomb-chapels, makes clear their great importance in ensuring the transition of the ‘justified’ individual into the afterlife. Their functioning had two distinct aspects, albeit connected: on the one hand to project the deceased through to the afterlife, on the other to commemorate his existence to those still living – the more to ensure that they keep up the various forms of commemoration that alone can ensure successful entry into the afterlife. ‘Remembrance was vital for the time after death, because the dead who were venerated and commemorated were retained in the community of ordered being. Those who were not commemorated were cast off into the land of non-being and relegated to an existence as ghosts.’

In short, the whole success of his ‘afterlife project’, so to speak, for any one individual depended on the efficacy of his tomb-chapel: both the beauty of the paintings and the power of their accompanying texts to generate the necessary admiration, prayers and recitations of his name, and the stranger, magical sense in which the images could assume the reality of the things they depicted in order to assure the spirit’s survival in the underworld. There was a tradition of visiting old tombs to admire their paintings, so that the quality and beauty of the paintings – that is, their purely aesthetic aspect – was integral to their memorial aspect.

The tomb-chapel is in effect an absolutely critical life-support system (or more aptly, afterlife-support system) for the akh, the transfigured being, on its journey to eternal life (Figure 24). There could hardly be a more compelling reason for getting the decoration right.

© Trustees of the British Museum.

Figure 24 The eternal life of a tomb-chapel (EA 37977, EA 37978, EA 37980, EA 37983, EA 37986)