The Art of Ancient Egypt | Publications for Educators | Explore & Learn

An outstanding purchase is the nearly complete tomb of Perneb. The tomb is a mastaba (MAH-stah-ba; from the Arabic term for "bench"). These tombs had an underground chamber in which the deceased was placed and a rectangular aboveground stone structure with inclined sides and a flat roof.

The story of how Perneb’s tomb traveled from the Old Kingdom necropolis of Saqqara in Egypt to the Metropolitan Museum in New York is as follows. Over the course of about forty-five hundred years, blowing sands had so completely covered the tomb that its existence was no longer known. Additional sand and debris had been piled on top of it in later centuries by Egyptians searching for building stones and, at the beginning of the twentieth century, by archaeologists excavating adjoining tombs. So great was the weight of the rubble that the ceiling in Perneb’s offering chamber broke, and the carved and painted walls collapsed inward.

The tomb was finally discovered in 1907. It could not be opened to the public, however, unless the offering chamber was cleared of debris and the walls dismantled to the foundations and then rebuilt from the ground up. Other mastaba tombs at Saqqara had finer reliefs and did not need such extensive reconstruction. Consequently, in the spring of 1913 the Egyptian director general of antiquities decided to accept a proposal from the Metropolitan according to which the Museum would purchase the tomb of Perneb for shipment to New York: all the work of excavating and dismantling the tomb was done by the Museum’s archaeologists and their staff.

View of Saqqara
All around the step pyramid of King Djoser (ca. 2630-2611 B.C.) are cemeteries where royal officials were buried throughout Egyptian history. Still visible are remains of Old Kingdom mastaba tombs, which were aligned along streets like houses and were meant to be eternal dwelling places for the dead.

In the middle ground on the right is the Museum’s excavation site. To the left Museum archaeologists are looking down into a pit where they have cleared away the sand from Perneb’s tomb.

Looking down into the tomb of Perneb
Here is a view of the excavated courtyard with the entrance doorway on the right. In the center a door and window open into the offering chamber. An opening in the flat roof that resembles the top of a chimney is actually the top of the burial shaft, which descended fifty-five feet to the burial chamber.

When the tomb was completely uncovered, the Museum staff took it apart and numbered the stones before shipping them to New York.

Tomb of Perneb
When the numbered stones arrived at the Museum, the staff rebuilt the tomb at the entrance to the Egyptian galleries. The Egyptians thought of a tomb as the eternal dwelling place for the deceased. With its doors and window, Perneb’s tomb imitated ancient mud-brick houses. Such houses are still built in Egypt today.

The public can go inside the rooms. On the chamber walls, painted carvings portray priests and men carrying offerings of food and drink toward Perneb, who sits before a table. On the far wall is a carving of a false door through which the Egyptians believed the ka of the deceased could pass in order to receive the offerings. In the small chamber to the left is a narrow opening beyond which is an inner room. Here, originally, a wooden statue for Perneb’s ka was placed. Through the opening the statue could smell incense that was burned in the front room. This arrangement reminds us that, in the Old Kingdom, statues of nonroyal persons were made not to be seen but to provide a place of materialization for the deceased’s spirit.

Line drawing of a figure of Perneb from the false door and facade of his tomb, showing Egyptian conventions of representing a standing man