Tomb Treasures of the Late Middle Kingdom: The Archaeology of Female Burials

CHAPTER 3 Types of Jewelry in Late Middle Kingdom Burials

ChApTer 3 Types of jewelry in Late Middle Kingdom Burials SourCeS There are several sources from which it is possible to gain information on personal adornments worn in late Middle Kingdom Egypt. First of all there are the items found in tombs and to a lesser extent in settlement sites. They provide a firsthand view of Egyptian jewelry. However, they are not without problems. Jewelry found in tombs might have been selected especially for the burial, and so examples found there may not really reflect the jewelry worn normally in daily life or at least on those occasions when jewelry was usually worn, such as special religious or social events. An average farming man or woman might have had some jewelry but would not have worn it while doing daily activities in the house or in the fields. Jewelry was therefore most likely also event related, and this certainly applies to a burial. Death was a “special” event. This is most clearly visible in the high proportion of jewelry specially made for the tomb in the court type burials. The deceased was especially well equipped with jewelry for the underworld, at least in these burials. Another problem with burials is inadequate recording and bad preservation . Beads are often found loose on the ground around the skeleton, and it remains pure speculation how to reconstruct their original arrangement. Beads at the neck might indicate one or more necklaces, but they might also belong to a choker. Beads on the chest might belong to a necklace, but there is also the option that they once formed a body chain. The order of different types of beads is very often lost, and too often the restringing of beads is left to the imagination and taste of a modern restringer. jeWeLry 115 A second source for ancient Egyptian jewelry is the range of depictions in art. Here we face different problems. Especially in reliefs and in large sculptures in stone or wood, women and men are shown with a quite narrow range of personal adornments. In the case of women these are the broad collar, armlets, and anklets. In contrast, most of the finds in tombs excavated show a quite different range of jewelry, indicating that the types known from art are jewelry for special occasions, perhaps seen as the most formal examples and important for scenes of religious self-representation. Some tomb scenes from the late Middle Kingdom also show women with jewelry that differs slightly from the more standard examples shown in most tombs and on contemporary stelae. Examples include a tomb scene at Qaw el-Kebir showing women with body chains and tomb scenes from Meir with women wearing chokers;1 both types of jewelry are otherwise not attested in tomb scenes or on stelae. These tomb depictions represent women with jewelry known from the finds in tombs. These images are rare, however, compared to the overwhelming majority of tomb depictions or pictures on stelae. An important source for jewelry depictions is the corpus of objects known as “concubines” in Egyptology.2 These are figurines of women often , but not always, shown naked. They are made of wood, clay, faience, and other materials. The function of these small-scale figures is disputed. Indeed, some Egyptologists have seen them as “dancing girls,”3 others even as representations of the “divine mother.”4 Recently, E. A. Waraksa has argued that clay figures of women, at least in the New Kingdom, were used in rituals for medical healing.5 S. L. Buddin regards them as figures promoting male potency and female fertility.6 The New Kingdom figures are often roughly made clay objects, not comparable to many Middle Kingdom figurines, which are fully developed small-scale sculptures. What is clear, though, is that they were certainly not concubines, as they were found in tombs of women and children too. They might rather have a strong connection with rebirth in the underworld7 and had the ability to “promote and protect fertility in daily life” and “to ensure the fertility of the deceased in the afterlife and/or to assist rebirth.”8 Here I will mainly discuss those made of faience and will refer to them as “faience fertility figurines.”9 They are most often made of blue faience and depict women, sometimes naked, sometimes fully dressed. They are always represented without feet. Even if they are naked, they wear at least some jewelry and are repeatedly decorated with tattoos. They are often shown [3.133...