A Note on Stratigraphy at Memphis

Abstract

In volume XI of this journal Christine Lilyquist published a short account of the ''Middle King dom (or more likely, as she herself argues, First Intermediate Period) cemetery discovered accidentally at Memphis in 1954 and excavated by the Department of Antiquities.1 In March 1975 I paid a brief visit to the site in the company of Abdulla Sayed Mahmoud of the Department of Antiquities, who is preparing a more detailed account of this work. The observations which I made on the context should be regarded as a supplement to Dr. Lilyquist's article; to carry them much further would amount to beginning a fresh survey of Memphis, though this is badly needed. A small number of diagnostic sherds were drawn on the spot and are illustrated here (fig. 1); Mr. Abdulla Sayed very kindly supplied me with the photograph for pl. I. It may be recalled that the burial chambers so far uncovered seem all to be part of one large multiple tomb, probably within one enclosure wall, of a type known elsewhere at this time. One of the excavation photographs shows that, on the east side of the relatively small total area excavated, the eastern wall of this communal tomb was exposed, and, lying in front of it, a row of offeringtables at something like three meters below the present average ground level. In pl. I this east wall of the tomb is towards the right side of the photograph, running away from the viewer. The heap of rough stones piled up against it serves now to protect one of the two funerary stelae found in position in the wall and left standing. The offering-tables were in a row occupying the ground beyond, which has since been partly buried again by an accumulation of earth. The discovery of the offering-tables was of great importance, for it indicated directly where the local ground level was at the time when the tomb was made, and that, as a consequence, most of the burial chambers were at the then ground level. A close parallel to this situation is provided by a large tomb excavated by the Antiquities Department in 1961 at Tell Basta.2 However, beneath this level, as Dr. Lilyquist notes,3 there appear to have been at least two more chambers, and these were presumably truly subterranean, cut into the local ground level beneath the main mass of the communal tomb. In the absence of a detailed contour plan of Memphis, or of a series of spot heights, it is difficult to relate with any precision this particular Middle Kingdom ground level to the floor levels of the nearby New Kingdom shrines and temples, but all would seem to be not far from the present water-table, which provides a rough-and-ready common horizon. Thus the lower burial chambers of the tomb are now partly filled with damp earth to suggest that the water table is not far beneath, and this is the case with the nearby small temple of Hathor Nebet-Hetepet,4 whilst the floors of the great Ptah temple and of the very ruined temple of Rameses II behind the Museum housing the famous colossus are now actually under water. It thus seems likely that the tomb was built on ground which was, if anything, slightly above the level which was used as the floor for the adjacent New Kingdom temples. It is evident from the north and south sides of the cutting in which the tomb lies exposed that the site had been covered by one or more strata of ancient debris. On the north side (pl. I) it can be seen that, when this debris began to accumulate, the roof of the tomb was in ruins and the rubbish