Oldal 56 [56]
OCR
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, PtahSokar-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.
