Mastaba

The word is modern and almost comically humble. Mastaba is Arabic for bench, the long low seat of mudbrick that stands outside Egyptian village houses, and when nineteenth-century excavators asked the local workmen what to call the flat-topped, slope-sided mounds they were digging, the men shrugged and named them after the bench. The Egyptians themselves had grander words: the tomb was the per-djet, the house of eternity, and the hwt-ka, the house of the ka, the vital force that survived death and needed food, drink, and a place to live. A mastaba was two buildings in one. Above ground stood the bench, a rectangular block of mudbrick or stone containing a chapel for the offerings and rooms for the rites. Beneath it, reached by a deep vertical shaft, lay the burial chamber with its sarcophagus, sealed after the funeral by a massive portcullis slab of granite. The idea was simple and eternal: a house above for the soul's business, a bedroom below for the body's rest, and between them a shaft that the living hoped robbers would never find.

The form grew from the oldest graves of Egypt, simple pits in the desert sand whose heat dried the bodies into leather, the first accidental mummies. As tombs grew grander, the pit gained a lining, then a roof, then a mound of bricks above it, and by the First Dynasty, around 3000 BCE, the great officials were buried at North Saqqara, the cemetery above Memphis, the ancient capital, in mastabas with niched and panelled walls that copied the painted facades of the royal palace, so that the dead man dwelt forever in a palace of eternity. Some of these earliest tombs were ringed with the graves of servants sent to attend their masters beyond the grave. Then, around 2670 BCE, came the moment that changed architecture forever. King Djoser of the Third Dynasty began a mastaba at Saqqara, and his vizier Imhotep, the architect later worshipped as a god of wisdom, enlarged it, then enlarged it again, then set a smaller mastaba on top, and another, and another, until six giant steps rose against the sky: the Step Pyramid, the first monumental stone building in human history. The pyramid, the very symbol of Egypt, is a stack of mastabas that forgot to stop.

Every part of the mastaba served the traffic between living and dead. The chapel stood on the eastern side, toward the land of the living and the sunrise, and there the family and the priests brought bread, beer, and incense, reciting the formula of a thousand of bread, a thousand of beer, a thousand of oxen and fowl. In the chapel's western wall, the wall that faced the dead, was set the false door, a stone doorframe carved with the owner's name and figure, through which his ka could pass to take the essence of the offerings while the substance stayed behind for the priests. Hidden somewhere in the bench was the serdab, the cellar, a sealed room holding a statue of the dead man, a spare body in case the mummy failed, with only a pair of slits for eyes to see and nostrils to smell the incense. In 1871, in a mastaba at Meidum, diggers broke into such a chamber by torchlight and found themselves face to face with Prince Rahotep and his wife Nofret, painted limestone figures with inlaid crystal eyes so lifelike that the workmen dropped their tools and fled into the night. The statues sit in Cairo today, and their eyes have lost nothing.

At Giza, beside the Great Pyramid of Khufu, the pharaoh for whom the largest pyramid was built, the cemetery of the court was laid out like a planned town, streets of uniform mastabas in neat blocks, the first designed city of the dead, and the largest of them belonged to Hemiunu, the vizier who oversaw the building of the pyramid itself. At Saqqara the nobles of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties turned their chapels into libraries of life. The mastaba of Ti, a royal estate overseer, shows cattle fording a canal while a herdsman chants a charm against the crocodile waiting in the reeds, poultry yards crammed with geese, boys wrestling, boatmen jousting with poles. The mastaba of Mereruka, vizier of King Teti, runs to thirty-two rooms of carved and painted estates, goldsmiths, scribes, musicians, and games. None of it was decoration. In Egyptian belief the carved word and the painted image had power: the herds, the bread, and the music would rise from the walls for the owner whenever the offerings failed. The mastaba was not a monument to a life ended but an insurance policy for a life that had to go on.

Kings abandoned the mastaba the moment Imhotep stacked it into steps, and after the Old Kingdom the nobles drifted away too, first to rock-cut tombs in the cliffs of the provinces, then, in the New Kingdom, to temple-tombs in the Theban hills, and the bench of eternity ceased to be the fashion. But it never vanished. Its niched facade lived on in the walls of Djoser's enclosure and on the golden shrine of Tutankhamun, the boy king of the famous tomb; its false door was carved for three thousand years; and its essential idea, the house above and the chamber below, survived in every Egyptian tomb that followed. Thousands of mastabas still stand at Saqqara, Giza, Meidum, and Dahshur, sunburnt and half-buried, and visitors still peer through the serdab slits at the statues waiting inside. The humble mud bench gave its name to the house of eternity, and the house of eternity grew into the mountain of stone that defines Egypt, which is not a bad lineage for a bench.