Goals

This project raises three main questions:

1) What can we know about the topography of the necropolis of Kom el-Khamaseen, the number and typology of its tombs, and the individuals buried there?

2) How was the funerary space in South-West Saqqara organized, in the area around Kom el-Khamaseen at the end of the Old Kingdom and the beginning of the First Intermediate Period?

3) Why some people of the Memphite court, of different social conditions (some of them of high status), decides to be interred so far in the desert in the period we are dealing with, that is to say, in the moment of the first crisis of the Egyptian centralized State?

The research goals of the whole project are:

1) To recover as much information as possible from the site of Kom el-Khamaseen, in order to get the most precise and complete knowledge about it.

2) To describe all the materials coming from Kom el-Khamaseen and recovered in situ or as have appeared in the catalogues of art galleries around the world (architectural structures or materials, objects of funerary equipment, inscriptions, iconography, pottery, etc.).

3) To excavate and document some other sites os the archaeological area surveyed in 2019 and to investigate if the chronology of any of them is the same than that of Kom el-Khamaseen. If so, to investigate the patterns of funerary space occupation in this part of the Memphite necropolis in this moment of the Egyptian history, as well as the reasons for this occupation.

4) To publish the complete results of the work in Kom el-Khamaseen in a final memoir within an Egyptological impact and peer reviewed series. We will include in this memoir all the materials concerned: those discovered in the site in 1997, those studied during the 2005 and 2006 seasons at El-Mohemat magazine, those which will be recovered in the new work on the site, and those documented in art galleries.

5) To publish the results of the excavations in the other sites of the concession, in which we have decided to carry out archaeological work.