The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities will launch a new virtual tour this evening, inside the Bani Hassan Archaeological Site, on its official pages on the Internet and social communication, and during the coming lines we will review the history of the Bani Hassan Cemetery, the archaeological area that contains an ancient Egyptian cemetery, located south of the city Minya, about 20 km, in the area known as Middle Egypt, which runs between Assiut and the "dead hostage" exile.
Cemetery was mainly used during the Middle Kingdom, which extends from the 21st century BC. M, although it includes some tombs from the era of the Old Kingdom, and we find on the south of the area of Bani Hassan a temple built by Queen Hatshepsut and succeeded by King Tuthmosis the Third, the local goddess of this region Bakht, known at the present time as the Grotto of Artemis, because the Greeks united the Egyptian goddess Bakht And the Greek goddess Artemis, the temple was called a cave because it is an underground building.
Provincial rulers in the central state were buried in local cemeteries cut in stone and decorated with inscriptions and drawings, just as the custom at the time was that the person who ruled over a specific area moved their positions by inheritance, and during the reign of the 12th Dynasty the power of local rulers began to be subject to restrictions, and the appointment of provincial governors or At least they are installed on their thrones by legalizing them only through the king.
The area of Bani Hassan Archeology includes approximately 39 ancient tombs belonging to the Middle Kingdom, specifically from the 21st to the 19th centuries BC. M "for the governors of Ghazal Province," the 16th district of Upper Egypt.
Bani Hassan cemeteries were built on the East Bank, unusually, in the construction of Egyptian tombs that were mostly built on the West Bank of the Nile, where there are two types of tombs "upper-range tombs and lower-range tombs," due to the economic situation of the deceased.
Those who were buried in the upper tombs were elite when we find their tombs expressing their distinguished economic condition and their social and political centers as leaders in Ghazal Province, and the tombs were located in a single row on the north-south axis, designed in special ways that contain an external courtyard and a room with stone pillars. We find that most of the large tombs carry on their walls inscriptions showing the biography of the owner of the tomb with scenes from daily life.
And the last discoveries of the region were in 2018, when the Ministry of Antiquities announced that it had found the burial chambers of the two cemeteries of Rimoshteni (No. 72), and the second Pakt cemetery (No. 33) from the top states of the Middle Kingdom era, in the Bani Hassan Archeology region of Minya Governorate, during archaeological cleaning Of their burial wells, and therefore, in the coming lines, we will review information about the area.
Thu, Apr. 9, 2020
