The Egyptian Expedition: The Excavations at Lisht

Archaeological and Iconographic Analysis of the Use of Funerary Personal Adornments in the Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt

“…Personal adornments that included loose beads were observed in nearly 400 Middle Kingdom tombs distributed over the sites shown in Figure 1. Among them, the number of tombs in each region in which intact or reconstructable personal adornments were found totaled 174 in the Memphis-Faiyum Region [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38], 53 in Middle Egypt [39][40][41][42][43][44], and 91 in Southern Egypt [25,42,[45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57]. Though these tombs were the focus of this study, they represent the number we are able to count rather than all the tombs.…”

“…Middle Kingdom personal adornments excavated from tombs can be classified into twelve types, as shown in Figure 9. Table 5 summarizes the number of tombs in each region [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38], [39][40][41][42][43][44], [25,42,[45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57] from which personal adornments were excavated. As a result, it is clear that single-string adornments were those most often found in tombs, followed by broad collars.…”