The necropolis of the Third Dynasty at Bet Khallaf (Egypt). New Material and Analysis

Bet Khallaf is a Third Egyptian Dynasty (2686-2613 BC ca.) necropolis located on the west bank of the Nile at 26° 19’ North, 31° 47’ East in the desert zone bordering on the crop cultivations, 20 km north of Abydos necropolis (Umm el-Qa’ab), site of the first royal burial place of the first Egyptian kings (Ist Dynasty 3000-2890 BC ca.). The site includes a five hectares area, where five mudbrick mastabas (rectangular mudbrick tombs with underground apartments) were discovered in May 1901 by John Garstang, as a mission for the Egyptian Research Account, and getting no further attention from the scholars. The most prominent tomb, K1, was believed to be an Old Kingdom (2686-2160 BC ca.) fortress, while the locals identified it as a ‘Deir (sacred place)’. Nevertheless, the possible royal character of the mastaba K1, already documented by Garstang and confirmed by the PhD research conducted by the lead researcher of this project, may suggest a new interpretative hypothesis for the site. In fact, its ‘royal’ elements would fill the architectural gap between the Thinite royal tombs (brick mastabas with distant cultic enclosures) and the first building phases of the Step Pyramid at Saqqara (massive stone mastabas within a rectangular enclosure), as supported by several scholars. This project is, therefore, aimed at getting new insights into this hypothesis, based on the first systematic study of all the funerary equipment deriving from the site, today kept in several museum institutions. The first group of archaeological documents, originally including 195 items, has already been documented during the last two years of research work, funded by a grant of the White and Levy Program (2022-2024). A second group of items is one of the major outcomes of the project, with an unexpected increase of items of 117% to the actual 334 objects, deriving from the check of the hardcopy inventories of the institutions mentioned before. Three more museum collections are involved: the Petrie Museum in London (20), GEM Museum in Cairo (20) and PENN Museum in Philadelphia (120), which will be the core of this current proposal, for an overall number of documents to study which would raise to 454, with a general increase of 232%. The planned monograph will, then, include 8 main chapters, where the typology and technological aspects of the archaeological material (pottery and hard stone vessels, metal implements, clay sealings, limestone reliefs and offering tables) and the comparative analysis with similar Archaic material will be conducted, providing also the study of the related archival documentation.

Dr. Ilaria Incordino, archaeologist and Egyptologist is the lead researcher for this Shelby White and Leon Levy Program project.