"Ancient Egyptian decorated tomb chapels were cheerful places for a family "picnic" with the dead. Imagine an archaeologist dropping in on one..."

[An archaeologist’s field blog]

A picnic in a tomb? That’s what ancient Egyptian families did on feast days. Not so weird. Eating and drinking in a graveyard in communion with the dead was a far more enlightened idea than our modern practice of choking on bitter sorrow. Tomb chapels in ancient Egypt adjoined sealed burial chambers. They were brightly decorated places where families gathered to make necessary offerings for the continued survival of the dead - who never truly died so long as you kept their memory alive.

Families would bring along picnic baskets of goodies to share with lost loved ones. Bread, grapes, pomegranates, nuts, date-sweetened cakes, maybe portions of fried Nile perch or honey roasted fowl and of course jars of beer. Imagine dropping in on an ancient Egyptian family feasting in a tomb chapel. I did exactly that today. Literally. Here’s how it happened. Like most archaeological discoveries, it happened by accident. (Chance’ is the world’s greatest archaeologist.) Our team had been digging in the Theban Valleys and I was taking a solitary stroll in the desert after we’d downed tools for the day. My foot hit a hidden rock in the sand, dislodged it - and opened up disaster. I vanished from daylight, sucked down into a funnel of sand like an insect victim of an antlion trap. Alarmingly the vortex of sand spun and became a grinding whirlwind in a desert sandstorm and a grainy voice hissed in my ears growing harsher until it became a growl like a wild animal in my ears. ‘I am Anubis,” the voice grated, “jackal guardian of the necropolis, and you have stumbled upon the very same tomb that you were buried in aeons ago. You vowed on your deathbed to rejoin your young family in your life to come and your wish has been granted. You are returned to them in voice and flesh, but you may only remain for the length of a festival, then you must return to your family of your new life." That’s when I dropped in on the feasting family. Stepped from a passage into a lamplit tomb chapel. A mother and a pair of young children sat on the floor around a grass mat loaded with jars and platters of food and drink. Ancient Egyptians believed in ghosts and called them KAs or sometimes BAs, so they didn’t shriek in fear when they saw me. They let out shrieks of startled joy. ‘Father’s Ka is here!” the little boy cried out, “but dressed so strange!” “Father!” the little girl shrieked. My little boy, my little girl. But not my other little boy and girl relaxing with my wife Anna in a hotel in Luxor across the Nile. And the young mother at this feast… The sight of her jumped out at me like a long-forgotten image inside a photo locket that you haven’t opened up in two thousand years. “Khamose!” she said. “Tamit,” I said. Tamit was the ancient Egyptian word for “cat” or “kitten”, a forever-pet name. And it seemed at that moment that I fell into a hole again, a pit of swirling memories of my life with this loving family that had ended all too suddenly in disaster. A spinning cyclorama… [to be continued]