This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The Theban Necropolis, opposite Luxor, consists of more than 400 tombs. In a new Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology study, researchers in Spain examined part of one of these tombs—chamber three in tomb TT 209—to reconstruct how this burial space was used and reused between its construction during the Twenty-fifth Dynasty (754–656 BCE) and the Ptolemaic period (305–30 BCE), when it was abandoned.
"We found a total of 16 mummified human individuals, a mummified dog, and a disturbed deposit containing the remains of at least four individuals," said first author Dr. Jared Carballo-Pérez, a researcher at the University of La Laguna. "The detailed study of the bodies indicates neither chaotic accumulation nor a loss of the original ritual over time.
Rather, there was a spatial logic in which each new deposition was adapted to the presence of previous bodies—a kind of funerary memory in the processes of reuse." Senior author Dr. Miguel Ángel Molinero Polo, a professor of Egyptology at the University of La Laguna, added, "We have few details regarding how the people who entered tombs behaved, what their motivations were in each historical period, and how they conceptually reconfigured the pre-existing space." To deepen the understanding of the deposition of bodies and the transformation of funerary space, the team excavated the chamber, photographed the mummies, and produced sketches and descriptions of their position, orientation and relationship with the tomb's structures. The chamber contains nine funerary deposits, comprising individual and multiple burials, as well as associated funerary objects.
For the earliest deposits, the team observed relatively separated burials in which bodies were placed in coffins. "The earliest individuals buried here appear to have been of high social standing, as they were interred in coffins, with funerary nets and amulets, and with an assemblage containing costly items, such as the contents held in Phoenician amphorae, a large number of which were found alongside them," said Molinero Polo. Later, toward the end of the 25th dynasty and during the Persian period (around 680–404 BCE), bodies began to be placed in any available space.
This resulted in denser use of space. In some cases, a change could be seen in the positioning of limbs, for example, a folded-in arm, whereas arms in earlier burials were typically stretched out. Also during the Persian period, the team observed a shift from individual deposits to a vertical arrangement of bodies.
Superposition of bodies was found in two-thirds of the burials in the chamber. In the southeastern section of the chamber, four mummies and one mummified dog are buried on top of one another in the Ptolemaic period. "The bodies buried in vertical superposition did not have coffins but were carefully mummified.
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