Chapter 5

The Second Intermediate Period

The Thirteenth Dynasty

Subsequent to the death of Amenemhat III, the sequence of known royal tombs fails. As already noted, the tombs of the last two kings of the Twelfth Dynasty remain unidentified, and of the large number of kings who ruled during the following Thirteenth Dynasty, only a handful can be associated with a particular funerary monument. Indeed, such monuments are rare, and it is clear that very many of the dynasty’s kings lacked monumental tombs – or at least not in the Memphite necropolis: two known tombs of the period were at Abydos.

In the Memphite area, known Thirteenth Dynasty royal tombs are to be found in an area spanning some 9 km between southern Saqqara-South and Mazghuna, to the south of Dahshur. Perhaps the earliest monument is a never-investigated structure at Dahshur (L.LIV; map 6B),¹ comprising an area of limestone rubble, some 40m square, with the line of a causeway leading from it. A fragment bearing the name ‘Amenemhat’ was found in the area, suggesting that the owner of this monument may have been Amenemhat IV, V or VI – although the fragment might have been ‘stray’ from the nearby pyramid of Amenemhat II.

At least one Thirteenth Dynasty pyramid lies at Dahshur-South (map 7A).² This contained the canopic jars of a king named Ameny-Qemau (fig. 14a),³ a monarch is not otherwise known. However, a king of the first part of the dynasty, Hornedjhiryotef, appears to have been surnamed ‘son of Qemau’, and it is not improbable that his predecessor, apparently with the prenomen Smenkare but no known nomen, was Ameny-Qemau. On a prominent hill overlooking the cultivation, the pyramid is located in an area previously used only for Old Kingdom private tombs. Probably never finished, only some parts of the brickwork survive, while there may be indications of a north chapel, but no certain remains of other elements of the complex. Only the inner part of the substructure survives, from the point where a large vertically sliding block prevented access through the ceiling of the vestibule at the bottom of the entrance passage into the rest of the tomb. From here a series of vestibules, closed off by a lateral portcullis, led to the burial chamber. It embodied what seems to be typologically the earliest of a new kind of combined sarcophagus/canopic chest, with cavities for both the body and its internal organs within the same block. This formed the floor of the room, and was sealed by a lid that was slid on top from the antechamber-area, which lay directly north of the sarcophagus. The lid was locked into place by a sideways-sliding portcullis-slab (fig. 14g); owing to its being in contact with the chamber walls on three sides, and the portcullis on the other, the inevitable tomb robbers had to resort to smashing the north end of the lid to gain access to the coffin, and then push the remains northwards, to rifle the canopic cavity. This is one of two basic burial chamber designs found during the Thirteenth Dynasty, to be termed here type 13/1.

A very similar, but slightly more evolved, substructure is to be found at the North Pyramid at Mazghuna (fig. 14b),⁴ at the southernmost extension of the Memphite pyramid-field (map 7A). Nothing of the core is now traceable, and in view of the lack of any brick debris, it may have been of stone, unlike preceding pyramids. The only part of the complex that has been traced in detail is a 116 m section of the foundations of the exceptionally wide causeway.

The actual entrance to the pyramid is destroyed, the first preserved part being steps descending from the north. However, since the size of the pyramid is very uncertain, it is not clear whether this was the actual entrance or whether further now-lost galleries existed under what would have been an exceptionally large pyramid for the period. In contrast with the state of the superstructure, the roofing of the rest of the substructure is intact, the plan being reminiscent of that of Qemau, albeit with additions; the arrangement of the combined sarcophagus/canopic chest, portcullis and antechamber is exactly the same. It seems likely that the pyramid had never been used for a burial, as the sarcophagus lid was found still stored in the antechamber.

As already noted, far fewer pyramid remains exist than kings of the Thirteenth Dynasty, and it is thus likely that many were buried in much less impressive sepulchres. One example of such a tomb has been identified, belonging to a king named Hor (fig. 14c).⁵ It was enlarged out of a simple shaft tomb on the north side of Amenemhat III’s Black Pyramid, with a new stone burial chamber added. Except for the omission of a portcullis and the use of a separate sarcophagus and canopic chest, the arrangement of Hor’s chambers mirrors the type 13/1 integral burial chamber found in contemporary pyramids. The tomb suffered relatively lightly at the hands of the tomb-robbers, thus providing us with our only sizable body of information as to what accompanied a Middle Kingdom monarch to the grave. The antechamber contained, principally, a naos containing a statue of the king’s ka, two alabaster stelae, a case for staves and a number of pottery and (dummy) wooden vessels. Inside his sarcophagus, the king’s body lay within a decorated rectangular coffin, wearing a gilded wooden mask. A wooden inner canopic chest contained four human-headed canopic jars.

A more elaborate form of integrated burial chamber, incorporating the roof-lowering mechanism first seen in the Hawara pyramid of Amenemhat III was employed in the South Pyramid at Mazghuna (L.LIX: fig. 14d).⁶ It differed, however, from the Twelfth Dynasty monument in that the chamber, sarcophagus and canopic chest were made from a single block of quartzite (type 13/2 – fig. 14h). Compared with earlier integral sarcophagi/canopic chests, the block was considerably deepened, leaving a appreciable void above the coffin- and canopic-cavities; the use of a single lid was abandoned in favour of two much more massive blocks. One was intended as a fixture, cut away below to give additional headroom for the burial party, but the other was supported by a pair of props, lowered by the use of ‘sandraulics’. The outer part of the descending corridor is lost, but it gave access to the interior via two granite portcullises – of a design and workmanship identical with that seen in the North Pyramid.

The South Pyramid itself has been entirely destroyed, along with much of the roofing of the substructure, although the remains of a brick enclosure wall of a wavy form are preserved, along with a simple mortuary temple of the same material on the east side, and another structure in the south-east corner of the enclosure. Quarry marks indicate that work was being carried on in the third year of an un-named king. The pyramid was 100 cubits square, a size that it seems was employed for a number of pyramids of the period, and was half the size of the majority of Twelfth Dynasty pyramids.

A very similar monument was built for Khendjer at southern Saqqara-South, (L.XLIV: map 6A; fig. 14e; pl. XLIIb),⁷ albeit with a slightly larger and more developed burial chamber, suggesting a somewhat later date. In any case, Khendjer appears securely placed as the sixteenth king of the dynasty, two places after Hor. The pyramid’s enclosure apparently had originally had a ‘wavy’ mud-brick wall, but ultimately this had been replaced by a niched one of stone. Remains of an eastern mortuary temple and a north chapel have both been located, together with fragments of the decorated pyramidion. The pyramid’s structure represented a further development of the arrangements found at the South Mazghuna pyramid.

Perhaps the latest known Thirteenth Dynasty pyramid in the Memphite necropolis was built near that of Khendjer (L.XLVI: fig. 14f),⁸ although until the traces of another monument that can be detected under the sand just to the southeast are investigated,⁹ this cannot be certain. Other traces northwest of the pyramid of Khendjer may also represent at least one other pyramid.¹⁰

Three-quarters larger than most pyramids of the dynasty, the substructure of Khendjer’s neighbour was one of the most elaborate of any Egyptian sepulchral monument, with a series of vestibules, changes of level and portcullises. One of its most remarkable features was its possession of two burial chambers. The principal one was carved out of a block of quartzite, with a conventional-looking sarcophagus and canopic chest within, but carved as one with the chamber. Closure of the chamber was to be by the now-usual ‘sandraulic’ means, but the tomb was never used. The other burial chamber lay to the west and had an arrangement of sarcophagus/lid/portcullis similar to Qemau’s, but reversed, with a separate canopic chest. The chamber has been described as a queen’s, but no equivalent installation is known elsewhere. Given the elaboration of the substructure, clearly inspired by the desire for security, its being a decoy to draw plunderers away from the real burial, being perhaps the most attractive explanation.

The pyramidion of the pyramid of Aya (pl. XLIIIa) came to light at Kataana in the Delta, but it is likely that it was taken there as booty by the later invading Hyksos kings, and the king’s tomb may actually have been in the Memphite necropolis or elsewhere in the Nile valley. In contrast to the elaborate pyramidia of Amenemhat III and Khendjer, it bears merely an image of the king offering to Ptah.

At Abydos, two royal tombs of the period have been located just northeast of the Abydene tomb of Senwosret III (fig. 13).¹¹ While their substructures were of designs closely resembling those of pyramids of the period, it remains unclear whether or not their superstructures were mastabas or pyramids. One, S9, employs the twisting, quartzite portcullis-blocked plan seen in all the pyramids of the dynasty, together with the combined burial chamber/sarcophagus/canopic chest typified by the pyramid of Khendjer, including the ‘sandraulic’ mechanism for lowering the access block of the burial chamber. Only some elements of the mud-brick complex survive, including what may be parts of the chapel and inner enclosure, together with part of a ‘wavy’ enclosure wall. Apart from the relative orientation of the substructure, the S9 complex is very similar to that of the Mazghuna-South pyramid, suggesting a similar date.

The other tomb, S10, is less regular than S9, and more badly damaged, although a typical late Middle Kingdom stairway flanked with benches survived in the main corridor. However, fragments of the funerary stela were found in the enclosure that was attached to the eastern side and appears to have housed the mortuary temple. One fragment named a king Sobek[hotep], and as the coffin apparently deriving from the tomb (see just below) bore Coffin Texts not attested before the middle of the Thirteenth Dynasty, it seems probable that the tomb was that of one of Sobekhotep III, IV or VI, the longer reigned kings of the period. It has been suggested that Sobekhotep IV may be the most likely of them, on the basis of his reign-length, and in particular that he certainly undertook other work at Abydos. On this basis, S9 is likely to have belonged to another king of this group, which also included Neferhotep I – who is also known to have undertaken work at Abydos and, with his long reign, is thus perhaps the leading candidate for S9’s owner. It is possible that a naos containing the seated figure of a king, found in a secondary context elsewhere at Abydos, and with (incomplete) texts similar in style to those of the Sobekhotep stela, may have come from the chapel of S9 or S10. As to why these two kings had been buried away from the Memphite necropolis, it may be noted that Sobekhotep III was of (Theban) non-royal birth and was thus beginning a new royal line, which may therefore have wished to cement its new status by burial in the hallowed cemetery of Osiris, the kings of the First Dynasty – and the soon-to-be-deified Senwosret III.

The poor state of S10 was due partly to Roman/Coptic quarrying (which also badly damaged S9 and the monument of Senwosret III), but also to the fact its quartzite combined sarcophagus/canopic chest had been extracted from the tomb for reuse in a cemetery that was established directly northeast (pl. XLIIIb – its lid has not yet been located). Here, the sarcophagus/chest formed part of a tomb (CS6), approached by a shallow mud-brick-lined shaft, of a type that also comprised tombs CS12–14. The remaining tombs in the cemetery comprised a series of axial galleries gently descending into the desert gravel (CS4, 5, 7, 8 and 9), walled with brick and roofed either by a brick vault or with logs, culminating in a stone-lined burial chamber.¹²

All these tombs are now anonymous, apart from CS9, which belonged to a king Useribre Senebkay (pl. XLIVa). Its limestone burial chamber, 3.48 m long x 1.48 m wide and made entirely of re-used blocks, was decorated in paint, with a winged sun-disk on its end wall, below which was a panel bearing a pair of wadjet-eyes, flanked by female figures presumably representing Isis and Nephthys. A winged sun-disk, with one of the king’s cartouches below it, and a female figure also appeared on the two side-walls of the chamber, between a pair of vertical yellow bands. The remains of the king’s plundered wooden coffin, canopic equipment and mummy (of a man who had died in battle) were found in the tomb, the gilded canopic chest having been manufactured from wood salvaged from the coffin of a king Sobekhotep, all-but-certainly the owner of tomb S10.

It is thus clear that Sobekhotep’s S10 was stripped for materials by the owners of at least two tomb-builders in the adjacent cemetery, which may have belonged to either the Theban Sixteenth Dynasty, or perhaps a local ‘Abydos Dynasty’ of the same general period;¹³ in either case, the plundering and dismantlement of S10 will have occurred within a few decades of the original burial. Reuse of material is also found in other tombs in the cemetery, including a limestone sarcophagus incorportated into tomb CS10, suggesting a centrally-sanctioned stripping of tombs of material for recycling following a change in regime in the area. Certainly, there is no way that the operations at S10 could have been in any way clandestine.

Royal Family Tombs of the Thirteenth Dynasty

Only a few royal family tombs from the Thirteenth Dynasty have been identified to date. At the complex of Khendjer, dependant tombs were restricted to the south side of the outer enclosure, with three shaft tombs; the western two are collapsed, but the other tomb was found jam-packed with three quartzite sarcophagi and canopic chests, all without indication of ownership.¹⁴ To the east lay a small pyramid containing two burial chambers, reached via two quartzite portcullises as found in the king’s pyramid (L.XLV; fig. 14e).¹⁵ Neither chamber, each with a close-fitting sarcophagus and canopic chest, was ever used. Here we see yet another example of a dependant royal tomb equipped for multiple burials in a single substructure, something not found in Old Kingdom.

The only other royal family tomb recorded from the Thirteenth Dynasty is that of Nubheteptikhered,¹⁶ presumably the daughter of Hor, who was buried in the adjacent shaft on the north side of the Black Pyramid at Dahshur. Like that king’s tomb, a stone-lined extension had been built into the simple original Twelfth Dynasty structure, with a stone sarcophagus containing her intact coffin.

The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Dynasties

Somewhere around 1650 BC, Egypt split between a group of rulers of Palestinian origin, ruling from the northeast Delta (the Fifteenth Dynasty, often dubbed the Hyksos), and Egyptian line(s) ruling from Thebes in the south (the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Dynasties, probably separated by a Hyksos incursion into the far south).¹⁷ Nothing is known of any royal cemetery at the Hyksos royal city of Avaris (Tell el-Daba), but we have already noted the possibly-Sixteenth Dynasty royal cemetery at Abydos-south, while a Theban royal cemetery of (at least) the Seventeenth Dynasty lay on the west bank at Dra Abu’l-Naga (maps 11 and 12; pl. XLIVb).¹⁸ Only one of the tombs of this latter group is currently positively identified, but others were seen and/or plundered in the nineteenth century, and yet more were listed in Papyrus Abbott. Having recorded the inspection of the tombs of Amenhotep I (p. 62, below) and Inyotef II (p. 38, above), the papyrus then notes in turn the condition of the sepulchres of Inyotef VI, Inyotef V, Sebekemsaf I, Taa,¹⁹ Kamose and (Prince) Ahmose-Sapairi, before concluding with the tomb of Montjuhotep II at Deir el-Bahari (p. 39, above).

The remains of the pyramid of Inyotef VI²⁰ have been found roughly a quarter of the way along the Dra Abu’l-Naga hill (pl. XLVa), and given that the Papyrus Abbott sequence terminates at Deir el-Bahari, one would assume that it represented the northernmost of a series of Seventeenth Dynasty royal tombs running southward from that point. This is supported by the presence of a number of high-status tombs of the period a little to the south.²¹ The papyrus notes that plunderers had attempted to tunnel under the pyramid from the adjacent tomb of Shuroy (TT13), a Ramesside tomb-chapel that lies directly to the right of the pyramid.

The pyramid itself, with a steep slope, was built on top of an earlier shaft tomb (K02.2), on the slope of the hill, and comprised an outer skin of bricks, now reduced to a few courses, with a rubble fill, with an inscribed cap-stone, surrounded on three sides by an enclosure wall. The eastern side may have been terraced, and was in any case was adorned by a pair of small obelisks, bearing the king’s names and titles. No substructure has been located in the immediate vicinity of the pyramid, which would thus seem to have been some distance from the monument itself. The only information available is that the king’s intact gilded coffin²² was found in 1827 in ‘a small and separate tomb, containing only one chamber, in the centre of which was placed a sarcophagus, hewn out of the same rock, and formed evidently at the same time as the chamber itself; its base not having been detached’.²³

A similar separate substructure seems to have held the burial of Inyotef V (to which the coffin of Inyotef VII was later added) high on the Dra Abu’l-Naga hill, in a chamber at the end of a corridor accessed by a brick-lined shaft some 7 m deep.²⁴ Inyotef V’s gilded coffin had been made for him by his brother Inyotef VI,²⁵ while that of Inyotef VII was a ‘stock’ piece, presumably reflecting his premature death.²⁶ The burial chamber presumably also held Inyotef V’s canopic chest.²⁷ As for the actual pyramid of Inyotef V, mentioned in Papyrus Abbott as ‘in the course of being tunneled into by the thieves at the place where the stela of its pyramid was set up’, fragments of its cap-stone have been found just southeast of the pyramid of Inyotef VI (pl. XLVb).²⁸ This suggests that the pyramid of Inyotef V itself lay close by, reflecting the aforementioned expectations on the basis of the Papyrus Abbott itinerary.

In contrast to these actual remains, neither the tomb of Sobekemsaf I nor anything deriving from it has yet to be positively identified – although the latter is not surprising, given that Papyrus Abbott describes the tomb as having been robbed-out shortly before the inspection in Year 16 of Rameses IX. However, the account in the papyrus (supplemented by the transcript of the trial of those responsible in Papyrus Leopold II-Amherst) does indicate that the tomb included provision for the king’s wife.

Likewise, no candidates for the tomb of Taa have yet been localised, although his mummy and coffin survive, having been removed from his tomb no later than the early Third Intermediate Period, ultimately being placed with other royal mummies in tomb TT320 (see p. 79, below). On the other hand, a monument in the Birabi (the southern end of Dra Abu’l-Naga/western edge of the Asasif – fig. 16) has been posited as a possible option for one of the last two tombs of the Papyrus Abbott Seventeenth Dynasty sequence, of Kamose and Ahmose-Sipairi.²⁹ This comprises a pyramid within a large enclosure, with a built chapel, but with its innermost part set into the pyramid – much like the contemporary pyramid of Tetisherit at Abydos noted below – together with a rock-cut substructure.

On the other hand, it is possible that rather than being strung out along the flank of the hill, the Seventeenth Dynasty royal necropolis was concentrated in the immediate area of the known sites of the pyramids of Inyotef V and VI. In that case, a large rock-cut tomb-chapel of late Seventeenth/early Eighteenth Dynasty date (K94.1) that lies high above the Iyoef tombs on the Dra Abu’l-Naga hill could become a possibility for the sepulchre of Kamose.³⁰ In any case, his coffin³¹ was found secondarily buried at the foot of the hill, perhaps near TT155, at the mouth of the Khawi el-Amwat, some 200m north of the Inyotef VI pyramid. It had presumably been moved at some point after Year 16 of Rameses IX, when Kamose’s tomb was found to be intact.

Royal family tombs of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Dynasties

It would appear that, like the tombs of the kings, the principal burial place of members of the royal family was Dra Abu’l-Naga, where various fragments have been found.³² That at least some royal wives were interred in the same structure as their husband is indicated by Papyrus Abbott’s report on the robbery of the tomb of Sobekemsaf I, which implies that Queen Nubkhaes B lay in a separate chamber close to that of her husband.³³

That the late Second Intermediate necropolis extended somewhat further north is indicated by the interment in rubble near the road to the Valley of the Kings, at el-Khor (see map 12; pl. XXXIb, top), of a woman who appears to have been a king’s wife (pl. XLVIa).³⁴ Such burials simply in rubble may have been common at the period, it having been suggested that the presence of the coffins of King Kamose and Queen Ahhotep I in such contexts may reflect their original interment, rather than later reburial, as has generally been assumed.