Abstract ICE XI Florence 2015

Zeinab El Said Hashesh
Ministry of Antiquities, Egypt
A Good Season to die: Variability in Seasonality of Death in Late Period Cemeteries
The spatial orientation of Ancient Egyptian interments is part of a larger system of funerary ritual and beliefs, which places the body of the deceased between the realms of the dead and the living through the liminal act of burial. Though burial orientation changed over time, directionality was clearly important, and carried connotations of symbolism related to the belief in the afterlife. Interestingly, there appears to be two different symbolic connotations at play, one connected with the direction the dead were facing, and one with the position of the body as a whole. Burial alignment was closely associated with the movement of the sun across the sky, particularly from the New Kingdom onward, and the bodies of the deceased were often aligned east-west according to the setting sun, with the head to the west, towards the realm of Osiris, and facing east, towards the origin of new life. Assuming, then, that this orientation was intentional, we can use the variation in alignment – caused by the movement of the earth around the sun - to calculate the seasonality of burial in cemetery samples using different methods such as archaeoastronomy and statistical analysis of field measurement data. This paper will compare the results of the burial alignment analysis at the Late period cemeteries at Memphis Necropolis.the variation in seasonality between Cemeteries could be due to economic and religious reasons ,also the correlations between certain diseases and seasonality of death