7 - Funerary Culture

Summary

In a beautifully written cultural history of mortal remains, Thomas Laqueur enquires into ‘how and why the dead make civilization’. Death for him is the fundamental ‘other’, in the face of which humans constitute their lives and civilise their behaviour. Unlike Philippe Ariès in his outline of a history of death in Europe, Laqueur sees more continuities than ruptures across periods and cultures. For Egyptologists who study such extraordinary expressions as pyramids, mummies, and Coffin Texts, it can be helpful to be reminded that Egyptian funerary culture is but one of humankind’s attempts at coping with death. Yet Laqueur moves blithely from the Upper Palaeolithic to Greek philosophy. His neglect of Egypt is a tacit rebuttal of the commonly held opinion that Egyptian funerary culture, with its wealth of splendid tombs, is unique. In fact, tombs and burials constitute a huge amount of archaeological evidence for the Old and Middle Kingdoms (Figure 7.1). They provide rich information on society and culture, and despite many blind spots and biases in the record they are an extremely dense source of evidence for the study of the pyramid age.