Hi Jammer,


> And this would have been of great concern to the
> AE.

You know, I am not sure about this. They went to great lengths in re-burying and re-sealing the tombs, but it does seem that as long as it could be called a burial it was OK (I mean all right, not Old Kingdom, heheh). In other words, the goods or broken furnishings didn't really matter in some cases, and then again in some the furnishings alone were reburied. Go figure!


> Their afterlife belief system had two
> cornerstones;
>
> 1) The deceased (King in the OK, adding Nobility
> in the MK, open to all who could afford it by the
> NK) had to revive, transition to existance after
> death, and take their rightful place in the order
> of things (Ma'at).
>
> I believe they felt the pyramids accomplished this
> very well. If their belief system ended here,
> there would have been no reason to ever get beyond
> the pyramid-tomb design.


I am not sure I aree completely with this. It seems that the pyramid complexes were slightly different from later tombs, since in the mid complexes the deceased king becoming a god and his cult actively being celebrated seems to be the first concern. But that does make sence vis a vis the ancient Horus beliefs and how the king was concerned with that during his life and after his death. Oh yes, the tombs were built and inscribed to mimic the cosmos, and hence they were skimilar to later tombs, but at the later burials the cults as such have disappeared and the tomb has becose a hidden place. Sure, this could be due to the robberies becoming a true nuisance, but I am not so sure about that because the beliefsystem remained largely unchanged (as far as the truly important parts go) throughout the dynastic times.


> 2) The corpse had to survive intact. It needed to
> be recognizable for the person's spirit (ka?) to
> find and animate it. It needed access to the grave
> goods to finish it's transition, and maintain it's
> strength and power in the afterlife.
.

Yes, so the books say. However.... evidence of the actual practise tells us something different: mummybandages filled with reeds and no human parts at all, incomplete or damaged mummies, several mummies withour furnishings stacked in one re-burial. And even the unfortunate Nesperennub.... *LOL*... with the pot glued to his very head!
There's also the baffing difference in the reburials: whereas (for example) Thothmose IV's (and Amenhotep III's too) burial was restored minutiously and with great care, that of Tutankhamun was just a causal job. Sure enough, this difference may stem from Maya and Djehutymose not wanting to draw attention to Tut's tomb ( as Carter suggests), but I don't think so because at this point it had been robbed twice and there seems to have been some sort of a guard-system in place at the Valley. In other words, I don't see any reason why they would act differently in the two cases, unless Tutankhamun wasn't as respected as TIV and AIII. Which again goes against the system, doesn't it.




>
> This was a major problem in the cycle of their
> beliefs. Between tomb robbers, official pillaging,
> decline and abandonment in the rites practiced to
> remember and honor the dead (mortuary temples
> closing down to save expenses, etc.), families and
> death cults ceasing obligatory donations to the
> dead.
>
> In effect, they could see this failure in their
> belief system in action as practiced with those
> who had died in the generations before themselves.
> During the Intermediary periods several important
> poems were written bewailing this very failure.


Yes, and some of the poems do actually tell us what the pyramids were built for, eh?


>
> Nothing else explains the developement from
> grandoise visible tombs to concealed rock cut
> ones, the inclusion of statuary for the dead to
> inhabit "in case" the corpse was damaged ot
> destroyed, magical carved donations that could be
> animated to serve if the descendants and priests
> who had been paid to sacrifice failed in their
> obligation...
>
> This is far from the "be all and end all", but if
> one tries to understand the developement of the
> interlocked AE funerary practices in specific
> segmented parcels (say, 4th Dynasty Giza pyramids)
> without absorbing the pre-Dynastic-3rd and 5th-NK
> evolutions), one could risk ending off on a
> tangent unsupported by the evidence as a whole.



Unless we have misunderstood some details. Have you read Loprieno's take on Ba, Ka and Akh?



Ritva