Читать книгу A History of Ancient Egypt - Marc Van De Mieroop - Страница 47

The striped part of the serekh depicts the façade of the royal palace or palace enclosure, a mud‐brick wall with recesses. Palaces must have dominated early political centers, although the excavated evidence for them is very slim. The earliest serekhs, painted on vessels placed in tombs, show that palaces predated the unification of Egypt. While we cannot say much about the king’s abode in life, we do know a lot about his burial, and the tombs and funerary monuments continue to proclaim his pre‐eminence throughout Egyptian history. From King Aha on, the royal tombs at Abydos were surrounded by subsidiary burials, which contained the remains of wives and attendants. In the tomb of Aha, the latter seem all to have been younger than 25 years at death, and probably they were purposefully killed to serve the ruler in the hereafter. The king’s tomb retained its central importance in later Egyptian history. Hundreds of officials built their tombs around the pyramids at Giza, for example, but in those days they were no longer put to death for the king. Early royal tombs were monumental: their superstructures were massive mud‐brick edifices with niched façades that imitated the palace façades. Because these superstructures resemble in shape the clay benches in front of modern Egyptian houses, we refer to them with the Arabic word mastaba, that is, bench. Already in the Early Dynastic Period officials also started to use the form, and throughout the Old Kingdom the mastaba remained the typical burial for elite members of Egyptian society.