Mastaba of Hesy-Re

The Mastaba of Hesy-re is an ancient Egyptian tomb complex in the great necropolis of Saqqara in Egypt. It is the final resting place of the high official Hesy-Ra, who served in office during the Third Dynasty under King Djoser (Netjerikhet). His large mastaba is renowned for its well-preserved wall paintings and relief panels made from imported Lebanese cedar, which are today considered masterpieces of Old Kingdom wood carving. The mastaba itself is the earliest example of a painted tomb from the Old Kingdom and the only known example from the Third Dynasty. The tomb was excavated by the Egyptologists Auguste Mariette and James Quibell.

The mastaba of Hesy-re was originally excavated in 1861 by Auguste Mariette and Jacques de Morgan. Mariette quickly discovered the famous niched gallery with its wooden panels and had these valuable artefacts brought to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. He found the grave shafts empty. In his journal, Mariette records his amazement at the wall paintings and wooden panels. However he erroneously described the mudbrick from which the tomb is built as "yellowish" when it is black. In the opinion of the later excavator James Edward Quibell, he had not worked very carefully and after the removal of the objects, the Hesy-re mastaba was covered over and again and abandoned. He completely neglected to have the mastaba included in the plans of de Morgan or to note its location himself.

The excavations of James Edward Quibell began in 1910 and ended in 1911. A second season ran from 1911 until 1912. Quibell initially had trouble finding Hesy-re's tomb on account of the poor account left by Mariette. However, a former excavation assistant remembered the tomb's location and led Quibell there. The first thing which Quibell's team located was the niched gallery decorated with wall paintings. The passage was filled in and roofed over with reeds, wood planks and some rubble on the same day, since the paint had begun to peel immediately on exposure to the sun. Additionally, Quibell claimed that the corridor was so narrow that visitors and excavators were at risk of rubbing the paint off the walls with their shoulders as they walked through it. Thus it was decided to fill the passage in again after a complete survey, illustrations and photographs had been carried out. Quibell reported also that he had to employ security personnel in exceptional quantity, to keep watch over the tomb day and night, in order to prevent theft and damage by graverobbers and vandals seeking either treasure or controversy.

The mastaba of Hesy-re is of exceptional significance for both archaeology and Egyptology, since it demonstrates clear developments in the structure and decoration of tombs when compared to earlier mastabas. In addition, innovations and precursors of ideas and practices pertaining to ancient Egyptian funerary cult and beliefs about the afterlife are found here.

Earlier mastabas, especially from the late Second Dynasty, contained offering steles and the depiction of the deceased was limited to these. In the tomb of Hesy-re, the so-called false doors in which the deceased are portrayed standing or walking appear for the first time. Furthermore, the tomb of Hesy-re is the first of its kind in which a full offering list appears, which would become an essential part of the tombs in later generations (as for example in the mastabas of Khabawsokar, Rahotep, and Metjen). There, the depictions of grave goods were completed by images of people bringing offerings. With the new form of tomb decoration begun by Hesy-re, the tomb owner gained more possibilities for symbolic representation: he could now leave and re-enter the tomb through the false door and more offerings were now available to him. In addition, the figural images on the cedar wood panels mark a first key point in the artistic development of tomb decoration: the deceased was no longer indicated by an anthropomorphic silhouette, he is now depicted more naturalistically. A somewhat similar style has since been uncovered in the underground galleries under the contemporary Pyramid of Djoser, in which the Pharaoh is depicted running in the Sed festival.

Hesy-re's mastabe (S2405) is located in the northern part of Saqqara, about 260 metres northeast of the pyramid complex of King Djoser in tomb sector G2-G3. The tomb is squeezed in between about a dozen other official graves, which date from between the Protodynastic period and the Fourth Dynasty, which are themselves packed close together.

The mastaba of Hesy-re was originally about 43 metres long and at least 5 metres high; it is oriented only ca. +11° off a north-south axis. Black, baked mudbrick was used as the building material. Interior rooms, including corridors and the exterior walls of the mastaba were originally carefully covered in white limestone plaster. The exterior walls were also decorated with an imitation of a palace facade. The entire monument is a massive mudbrick building, completed with grey granite door frames and decorative cedar wood panels.

The 'official' entrance is located on the east side. A wall stands in front of the east wall of the mastaba, forming a narrow corridor. This corridor leads south and then turns to the west after 16 metres in order to run along the south side of the mastaba. There it widens into a kind of anteroom, which was blocked up immediately after completion. The north side of the anteroom was decorated with a frieze at the time of excavation depicting people, livestock and a crocodile. This is now in the Cairo museum. Slight remains indicate that the south side of the anteroom may also have been decorated. The anteroom led on to the serdab, which extended in a southerly direction and contained the stone base of a ka-statue which was not preserved. The corridor led on from the serdab in a westerly direction. Another corridor branches off to the north after 6 metres, where it terminates in a 23 metre long passage. This was originally sealed with six blocks of granite, but grave robbers destroyed these in antiquity. After this first branch, the entrance corridor continued another 4 metres to the west, where it turned off to the north and ended in a 37 metre long niched gallery. The niches were painted and contained eleven decorated wooden panels.