The Old Kingdom cemetery at Hamra Dom (El-Qasr wa es-Saiyad)

by Säve-Söderbergh, Torgny

The cemetery at Hamra Dom, as a rule called El-Qasr wa es-Saiyad after two villages in the neighbourhood, is one of the "classical" provincial cemeteries from the 6th Egyptian Dynasty. The majority of the hieroglyphic texts has been made accessible to scholars by P. Montet and E. Edel, but the older copies are not always correct, nor have the reliefs of the tombs, with few exceptions, been published. The present publication is based on a documentation made by the author in 1975 and later in connection with an exploration of the area by an expedition funded by the Smithsonian Institute, the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity at Claremont (California), and the Institute for Ancient Studies of Brigham Young University (Utah), with the primary aim to obtain full information on the archaeology of the area where the famous Gnostic library was found by peasants in 1945. The reliefs of the Old Kingdom tombs are rendered in line drawings by the author, based on photographs and collated in