Hedvig Győry: Mélanges offerts a Edith Varga „Le lotus qui sort de terre” (Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts Supplément 1. Budapest, 2001)

ROSALIE DAVID: The Riqqeh Pectoral in the Manchaster Museum

gested that Cemetery A may have been reserved for upper class interments while Cemetery B accommodated the burials of poorer people. The type of grave found in Cemetery A consisted of a plain or bricked shaft which descended a distance of between seven and forty feet into the ground; at the bottom, one or more chambers opened out on the north and south sides of the shaft. The chamber entrances had been sealed after interment, using bricks and mud plaster. From the pottery and inscriptions of royal names that he found there, Engelbach concluded that the cemetery had been in use for some 150 years, during the period which included the reigns of Senusret I and Senusret III (c. 1971 - c.1843 BC). However, the style of the coffins was more characteristic of Dynasty 11 than Dynasty 12, indicating that the provincial town which the cemetery served was not abreast of the latest developments in funerary equipment found elsewhere. Although the tomb chambers had been carefully sealed, it became clear that most of the burials at Riqqeh (particularly in Cemetery A) had been plundered, either immediately after interment or within a generation of the last burial in the tomb. By examining these robbed or partially plundered graves, Engelbach was able to draw several conclusions.

3 For example, he found evidence that many of the bodies were apparently still in a pliable state when the robbers entered the tombs: after they had dragged the wrapped bodies out of the coffins, in order to seize the jewelry from between the bandages, they then threw them aside, so that the bodies fell to the ground in a way that indicated that they were flexible, and had been relatively recently interred. He also concluded that the necropolis guardians had been responsible for the initial plundering of the richest tombs, because it was evident that the robbers had detailed knowledge of which burials contained significant treasure and were therefore worthy of their immediate attention. In many of the tombs in Cemetery A, Engelbach discovered that whereas one room had been cleared of its contents in antiquity, another remained unopened, but when he and his workers investigated these closed chambers, they invariably found that they contained no items of value. Prior knowledge of the arrangement and disposition of funerary goods within each tomb had obviously enabled the robbers to be selective about which rooms they opened and ransacked. Engelbach, op. cit., pp. 21-22.