![]() In the Shadow of the Pyramids by J Malek (London, 1986) Links 'The Old Kingdom' by J Malek, in The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt edited by I Shaw (Oxford University Press, 2000) The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts by R Faulkner (Warminster, 1986) The Pyramids of Egypt by IES Edwards (Harmondsworth, 1993)Įgyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1999) Egyptian Art of the Old Kingdom by D Arnold (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1999) Also, while domestic housing was made of sun-dried bricks, pyramids and tombs were built of stone - so their chances of survival were infinitely better. Pyramids and tombs, by contrast, were built on desert margins, where the space was not needed for other buildings, so were left to tell their tale centuries after they were built. Egyptian towns and villages were situated in the Nile valley, where old houses were pulled down and new ones built on the same spot, because space was valuable - so little remains of the older buildings. ![]() There are other reasons why so much of our evidence is based on funeral rites. But this does not mean that death was the Egyptians' only preoccupation. Even papyri come mainly from pyramid temples. Most of our traditional sources of information about the Old Kingdom are those concerned with death and the rituals surrounding death: these include pyramids, tombs and graves, but also statues, reliefs and paintings. Houses in which ordinary Egyptians lived have not been preserved, and when most people died they were buried in simple graves with few funerary goods. We know infinitely more about the wealthy people of Egypt than we do about the ordinary people, as almost all the monuments were made for the rich and influential.
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