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the attitude towards the religious aspect of the king as well as the kingship changed after
they lost their reliability. In the mortuary cult instead of the importance of the living
king private individuals started to prefer the god Osiris, whose Memphite form, Ptah¬
Sokar-Osiris, became one of the most important aspects of the god and whose growing
importance can be observed from the reign of Thutmose III as well. This development
explains the reason for choosing the Memphite necropolis, the ancient sacred abode of
Ptah-Sokar-Osiris, at the same time it made the private tombs of high officials separate
from the royal tombs which had never happened before.
The relocation of the private tombs can also be observed in the case of the burials of
‘royal wb3s’ the situation of which corresponds with the changes in the usage of the
necropolises. Thirty-nine burial places of thirty-eight individuals of the one hundred
and three officials presented in this corpus can be located exactly or with more or less
certainty in the Theban as well as the Memphite necropolis, and even at Amarna. The
exact location of seventeen tombs are known, in all the other cases the place of burial is
indicated by the provenance of monuments or implied by the stylistic criteria of the
decoration of these objects. (Table 8.) During the 18" dynasty until the Amarna period,
burial of ‘royal wb3s’ had taken place at Thebes independently of the official’s place of
function as discussed previously. Parennefer and Seth represent the transition in the
progress of replacing the Theban necropolis with the use of the Memphite one. Both
officials served under the reign of Amenhotep III and Akhenaten. Parennefer started to
have a tomb a constructed at Asasif in Thebes but left it unfinished when he followed
his lord to the new capital, Amarna where he began to construct another burial place.
And Seth is the first known ‘royal wb;’ whose sepulchre was discovered in the Memphite
necropolis, at the Bubasteion in Saqqara (1.13). From the post-Amarna era on, ‘royal
wb3s’ almost exclusively used this northern necropolis to create their last resting place,
especially the central cemetery at Saqgara, with one exception at Dahshur during the
reign of Tutankhamun. Nevertheless, two officials, Hesinetjeref and Amenhotep from
the 19" dynasty and the reign of Ramesses IX respectively, might have been buried at
Thebes as their funerary cones indicate. Regrettably enough, the number of known
tombs are rather low compared to the total number of individuals in the corpus, thus it
does not allow us to make a detailed analysis or draw further conclusions regarding the
spatial distribution and organizing principle within the necropolis.