The Secrets of Tomb 10a: Middle Class Burials From the Middle Kingdom

People were just as silly 4,000 thousand years ago as they are now, but they manifested it in different ways, of course, which is what makes it interesting. The Ancient Egyptians, for example, had a well-known obsession with how to get ahead in the afterlife, and the wealthier citizens and royalty poured a lot of money, time, and thought into the items that would go in the tomb with them.

Generally, museum exhibitions tend to concentrate on the flashier tomb accessories – golden death masks, jewels, and statues. But a new exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, goes down a different, somewhat more modest road. The Secrets of Tomb 10a (don’t look for the prequel Tombs 1-10!), which opened Oct. 18, is an unusually comprehensive staging of what was in the tomb of Djehutynakht, a local governor from central Egypt, and his wife, Lady Djehutynakht, who died sometime during the Middle Kingdom (2040 BC – 1640 BC), around 4,000 years ago, and were buried at the necropolis of Deir el-Bersha.

“It’s unlike any Egyptian exhibition I can think of because, for one thing, 90% of  the material is from one tomb,” says Denise Doxey, Curator, Ancient Egyptian, Nubian, and Near Eastern Art at MFA Boston. “So instead of having isolated bits of nice artwork without a context, this is very much focused on context.”

“Also, people will be surprised because most exhibitions are about kings, and include big monochromatic sculpture that’s not approachable, whereas this material is more small-scale and intimate.”

There is spectacular art in this exhibition, Doxey emphasizes, but there’s also a lot of stuff that, were it not 4,000 years old, would be regarded as trivia. That’s important, she says, because it shows the level of detail gone into by the people buried in this tomb in preparation for their adventure in the great beyond.

The exhibition features a full-scale model of the tomb that visitors can enter and explore, plus four of the six original coffins in which the couple were laid to rest (three each – the outer ones were destroyed by robbers). It also includes more than 250 items from inside the tomb, ranging from cult objects, vessels for food and drink, furniture, jewelry, walking sticks, and sealed beer jars (one of which will be opened and examined during the run of the exhibition).

The exhibition also showcases a rather strange collection of wooden models from the Middle Kingdom representing, in miniature form, a range of activities and items that would have been found on the couple’s estate, such as plowing, weaving, and making bricks. Visitors are in for a rare treat in terms of the unusually colourful paintings inside the tomb and decorating the coffins, Doxey says.

The museum has had its work cut out for it, translating the spells written on hieroglyphics on the colourful coffins. “Some are cute and anyone could relate to them,” says Doxey. One, for instance, loved by kids especially, says: “In the afterlife, I don’t want to eat any excrement.”

Most spells follow themes of human comfort, such as: “I want to eat and drink and have a good time.” The collection of models, also, lends a warmly human aspect to life 4,000 years ago. “Most of them are folksy, not that special,” admits Doxey. “It reminds you that these people are living in the boonies and don’t have cutting edge artists. It gives you a real sense of daily life, even though that wasn’t the purpose of the models at all. They’re meant to be physically making things for you for afterwards – such as beer and bread. But it happened to be a great snapshot of what was going on when these folks died.”

The scale and pedestrian nature of the models makes for a good point of access for anyone into the everyday world of Ancient Egypt. “This is being billed as a very family-friendly show and it is,” Doxey enthused. “You don’t need to appreciate subtle differences between artists’ techniques. Looking at a model of a cow doesn’t need explanation, but there’s more if you want it.”

The overall idea of “The Secrets of Tomb 10a” is to give a truly comprehensive view to someone today of what went into the tomb of someone living in Egypt’s Middle Kingdom who wasn’t poor, of course, but wasn’t a king or queen either. “I hope [visitors] will have a better sense of Egypt beyond big stone statues of kings. I hope they’ll get a better understanding of Egyptians and what their life was like, and about the Egyptian afterlife other than what you see in Hollywood movies,” says Doxey. “It makes them seem, I hope, much more human. I also hope that people pay attention to the conservation and archaeological aspects of it, which this exhibition is uniquely able to address. We’d like more awareness of what goes on behind the scenes. That’s not what you usually think of when you go to an exhibition.”

In deepening the visitor’s experience of an excavated site, MFA Boston had a huge advantage out of the gate because it sponsored and directed, in conjunction with Harvard University, the original excavation of Tomb 10a performed by George Reisner and his team in 1915. “So we have the whole history of the excavation and discovery,” Doxey explains. This means there’s plenty of information about the scientific work around the excavation. “So it’s the archaeological story as well as the art story,” she points out. “There’s a Belgian team working there right now, so we end with information about what’s been going on there.”

Science, in fact, provides a situation of nail-biting suspense as DNA experts try to figure out whether a severed head left gruesomely on display on top of one of the sarcophagi in the tomb by marauding treasure-seekers belongs to either Mr. or Mrs. Djehutynakht. Doxey says there’s no word yet when forensic experts will get to the tooth they extracted from the skull in queston. Stay tuned for that news.

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About The Author

Helen Atkinson

Last three pieces by this author:

My Favourite Ancient Spot in London - the Female Gladiator | Reserve King Tut Tickets Now! Advance Booking Now Open for Denver Tutankhamun Exhibition | Was Göbekli Tepe a Temple... or a Playpit?

Heritage Key's NYC Correspondent, Helen Atkinson, has 20 years of journalism experience in subjects ranging from the reinsurance industry to canoeing down the Bronx River. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Helen studied English Literature at Oxford, before embarking on a writing career. She moved to New York in 1994 and intends to stay there.