Mortuary Practices Through Time at El Hibeh, Egypt

Summary

El Hibeh is an isolated urban site some three hours south of Cairo. The walled town was founded at the beginning of Egypt’s Third Intermediate Period, when it reached its greatest importance, and was occupied for approximately a millennia and a half--at least into Coptic/Early Islamic times. Hibeh was an important provincial town during Egypt’s Third Intermediate Period (early first millennium BCE) after which it lost much of its regional significance. The town mound is surrounded by burials cut into the natural limestone; the mound itself was also used for burials at various times. This paper provides an overview, based on available evidence, of shifting mortuary practices at the site through time and seeks to correlate these shifts with developments in contemporaneous political, religious, economic, landscape, site usage and other patterns as relevant.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• The Practices of Death: The Archaeology of Mortuary Ritual in Ancient Egypt and Sudan

Keywords

Spatial Coverage