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Updated: June 13, 2025
The two great nécropoles of Memphis and Abydos were originally the seats of the worship of the two Egyptian gods of the dead, Seker and Khentamenti, both of whom were afterwards identified with the Busirite god Osiris. Abydos was also the centre of the worship of Anubis, an animal-deity of the dead, the jackal who prowls round the tombs at night.
The town of Abydos, which has vanished and left no wrack behind, rose once in this spot where we now stand, on the very threshold of the solitudes; but its necropoles, more venerated even than those of Memphis, and its thrice-holy temples, are a little farther on, in the marvellously conserving sand, which has buried them under its tireless waves and preserved them almost intact up till the present day.
The Theban nécropoles of the New Empire are by no means exhausted by a description of the Tombs of the Kings and Shêkh 'Abd el-Kûrna; but few new discoveries have been made anywhere except in the picturesque valley of the Tombs of the Queens, south of Shêkh 'Abd el-Kûrna. Here the Italian Egyptologist, Prof.
At sight of the unimagined emblem, a priesthood who in secret sanctuaries had evolved nearly all but that, flung themselves into crypts beneath, pulled the walls down after them, burying unembalmed the arcana of a creed whose spirit still is immortal. In Egypt, then, only tombs and necropoles survived.
Silence and death, beneath a transcendent clearness, in the constant radiance of a kind of mournful apotheosis it was such surroundings as these that the Egyptians chose for their necropoles.
We see it on the Gallo-Roman rings of the Museum of Namur, and on the plaques of the belt, dating from the same epoch, which form part of the magnificent collection of M. Moreau. Schliemann tells us of it at Mykenae and at Tiryns. Chantre found it on the necropoles of the Caucasus.
One divines instinctively and at once the catacombs, the hypogea and the mummies that lie beneath! These necropoles of Abydos once and for thousands of years exercised an extraordinary fascination over this people the precursor of peoples who dwelt in the valley of the Nile.
He notes that "large numbers of Neolithic flint weapons are found in the desert on the borders of the Fayyum, and at Helwan, south of Cairo," and that all the important necropoles and kitchen-middens of the predynastic people are to be found in the districts of Abydos and Thebes, from el-Kawamil in the North to el-Kab in the South.
The necropoles investigated by M. de Morgan and his assistants extended from Kawâmil in the north, about twenty miles north of Abydos, to Edfu in the south. The chief cemeteries between these two points were those of Bât Allam, Saghel el-Baglieh, el-'Amra, Nakâda, Tûkh, and Gebelên. All the burials were of simple type, analogous to those of the Neolithic races in the rest of the world.
These necropoles, excavated in the rocks or hillsides, or built within the pyramids, consist of rows of chambers with halls supported by columns, which, with the walls, are often covered with paintings, historical or monumental, representing scenes from domestic or civil life.
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