12 elites. On the other hand the depictions of craftsmen at work or of agricultural scenes – either in relief (cat. no. 14), paintings or three-dimensional models – and the surviving literary references to other social groups offer important insights into the lives of all social strata in Ancient Egypt. The abundant material deriving from tombs and burial sites range from the royal interments in the pyramids and the later rock-cut tombs in the Valley of the Kings, to the monumental cemeteries of associated officials, priests and military personnel, and the burial sites of their servants and clientele, to the important tombs of outstanding craftsmen and artists. These archaeological references have shaped our view of a culture dominated by a cult of the afterlife, with the result that Ancient Egyptian culture perhaps best represents and elucidates what Jan Assmann summarised in his pertinent and universal claim that “death is the origin and the centre of culture.”2 This theory, which is convincingly verified by Assmann in his book Tod und Jenseits im Alten Ägypten (Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt), expressly refers to the very beginning of human history and the earliest signs of human culture. Reflecting on one’s own mortality, burying one’s relatives, wishing to maintain in contact with one’s ancestors, assuming the existence of an afterlife, and believing that numina and deities control the universe and the forces of nature – all of these practices and beliefs revolve around the cultural factor of death. In hardly any other society does the cultural driving force of death assume such diverse forms as it does in Ancient Egypt. At the same time, it becomes apparent that the Ancient Egyptians in no way had a death wish; instead, their adherence to a firmly established and meaningful divine cult, coupled with a mortuary cult, meant that they were to a certain extent reconciled with death, or “overcame” it with their concepts of the afterlife. The fascination with Ancient Egypt that gradually took hold of Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries and has since become an enduring global phenomenon, probably stems not only from admiration for this culture’s artistic and artisanal products and their specific aesthetic, but Fig. 2 Mortuary temple of Pharaoh Ramesses III in Medinet Habu, Western Thebes
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