Ancient wooden statues from Middle Egypt (2205–1630 BC). A comparative study on style, functions and ritual entanglements

Many burials of the First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom in Middle Egypt include wooden statues as representations of the deceased or close family members. They were either erected in the superstructure or placed with the coffin in the burial chamber. For the first time, Tina Beck examines a corpus of 306 wooden statues from the necropoleis of al-Hawawish, Qaw el-Kebir, Deir Rifeh, Gebel Asyut al-gharbi, Meir, Deir al-Barsha and Beni Hasan, their socio-historical and archaeological context, and their function(s) within the funerary rituals and mortuary cult. The study consists of two parts. Part 1 contextualizes and analyzes the wooden statues, while Part 2 comprises the open access-catalogue for the structuralistic object descriptions. From the perspective of symmetrical archaeology and material culture studies, local peculiarities and supra-regional similarities of the wooden statues, their funerary contexts and ritual entanglements are identified and discussed. In that regard, the publication contributes to the understanding of burial customs in Middle Egypt during the First Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom.