According to ancient Egyptian belief, the created world was populated by humans, spirits of deceased humans, deities, and a host of supernatural beings whose identities were never precisely defined. The Egyptian language refers to the first three categories as, respectively, rmT, Ax or mwt, and nTr, but lacks a proper term for the fourth class. Egyptians nonetheless recognized the existence of these beings, and we are therefore justified in studying them as an ontological category. Instead of defining “demons” as a uniform group, the Egyptians gave specific names and occasionally physical attributes to its individual classes and members. These names and associated iconography do not so much characterize what these demons are as identify what they do. From the perspective of humans, their behavior can be benevolent and malevolent. Two main classes of demons can be recognized: wanderers and guardians. Wandering demons travel between this world and the beyond acting as emissaries for deities or on their own accord. They can bring diseases, nightly terrors, and misfortune and are therefore basically malevolent. Guardian demons are tied to a specific locality, either in the beyond or on earth, and protect their locality from intrusion and pollution; as such, their function is rather benevolent. In the Late and Ptolemaic and Roman Periods, they came to be regarded as deities in their own right and received cult.

The site of Deir el-Ballas was an important location in ancient Egyptian history as it appears to have been the forward campaign palace of the Theban ruling family of the late 17th Dynasty. Located 40 km north of Thebes, resources were gathered at this site in the reigns of Seqenere Tao, Kamose, and Ahmose before being deployed against the Hyksos. The palace was abandoned at some point during the reign of Ahmose – presumably after the defeat of the Hyksos – and the court returned to Thebes, but a small, non-elite population continued to inhabit the site. Based on the pottery and other material culture found in the cemeteries, the population seems to have peaked during the reigns of Hatshepsut/Thutmose III, then tapers off sharply in the reign of Amenhotep II/Thutmose IV. There is no material culture from the site reflecting usage during the subsequent Amarna period, and only a few tombs contained material pointing to a very limited presence in the late 18th-early 19th Dynasties.

The site was excavated briefly by James Quibell in 1894-95 (with no information published from his activities) then more thoroughly by the Hearst Expedition in 1900-1901 under the direction of George Andrew Reisner who was assisted by Albert Lythgoe and F.W. Green. Reisner never published his work at the site but several scholars have reviewed the field notes and documentation from the Hearst Expedition and used this information for their studies. Additionally, in the 1980s Peter Lacovara returned to the site for several brief seasons of excavation and clearance in some of the domestic areas. While the palace and settlement have been published to a limited extent (Stevenson Smith 1998, Lacovara 1981, 1990, 1993, 2006), the cemeteries at the site have received minimal attention with only a few vessels from the tombs appearing in publications (discussed in detail in this dissertation). To date, no systematic examination has been made of the tomb assemblages, and thus it is the purpose of this dissertation to present as comprehensively as possible the material from these non-elite burials. Re-examining an excavation from over a century ago presents numerous challenges: The cemeteries were all badly looted prior to the Hearst Expedition’s work at the site, the recording of the excavation work undertaken in 1900-1901 is uneven with many tombs and houses lacking any notes whatsoever, and many of the objects that were unearthed have lost their specific provenience or have suffered damage at some point between their discovery and their present, stable condition at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Nevertheless, despite the frustrations inherent in this type of investigation, the archival material and physical objects deserve to be published so they can shed light on the non-elite community who lived and died in the early 18th Dynasty at Deir el-Ballas. This cemetery material represents both a time period and a segment of the ancient Egyptian population about which there are very few studies, so however compromised and incomplete the primary data may be, it remains important to publish it.

In discussing the material remains from the cemeteries, the social status and burial customs of the population buried at Deir el-Ballas are examined using comparative evidence from Thebes and other nearby Upper Egyptian sites. Differences and similarities in funerary practices are highlighted, providing a picture of the regional specificity of this small, provincial population and the extent to which they did and did not emulate the capital at Thebes. Also in this dissertation, I explore the possible significance between the placement of the three cemeteries at the site and their relationship with the abandoned palace. I hypothesize that the inhabitants of Deir el-Ballas held a cultural memory of the Theban triumph over the Hyksos and maintained a connection with the illustrious past embodied in the abandoned royal palace. To explore this idea, the use of the landscape and the visual relationships between the palace and the cemeteries are analyzed through the lens of anthropological theories of phenomenology, cultural memory, and materiality. Evidence from Thebes and Abydos for worship of the divinized late 17th Dynasty – early 18th Dynasty rulers, especially king Ahmose but also the queen Ahmose-Nefertari, shows that the royal family who lived at Deir el-Ballas was held in particular esteem for generations after they had passed into history. We lack analogous textual or iconographic documentation of royal ancestor worship at Deir el-Ballas due to the lower social standing of its residents and their lack of access to such methods of display. However, by choosing to site the three cemeteries of the site with a direct viewshed of the royal palace, the population may have been connecting with the vestigial prestige and royal power associated with the palace. Several tombs in the cemeteries included faience tiles that were part of the palatial decoration among the grave goods; these tiles may represent a tangible amuletic link between the intercessory power of the royal family and the hoped-for successful attainment of the afterlife by the deceased.

During the Third Intermediate and Late Periods, wealthy Egyptians were sent to theirafterlives in dazzlingly decorated and inscribed coffins nested like Russian dolls. Current understanding of these vessels for rebirth comes almost exclusively from analyses of Theban coffins, which focuses on dating the coffins primarily through changes in decorative layout. Local traditions outside of Thebes have been almost completely neglected and were assumed to be merely derivative of the Theban tradition. Thus, the work of non-Theban artists and scribes has typically been dismissed as "naive" or "provincial"--even though, in reality, very little is known about non-Theban coffin workshops, or about the training of the artists and scribes who worked in them.

A large number of coffins datable to post-New Kingdom pharaonic Egypt are thought tocome from the city of Akhmim, which lies two hundred kilometers north of Thebes. These Akhmim coffins present an excellent opportunity to characterize and evaluate a regional tradition. Sadly, the cemeteries of Akhmim were thoroughly plundered in the late 19th century, and the pillaged pieces were sold on the contemporary art market. Hence, until now, the Akhmim coffins have only been datable by means of stylistic comparisons to the Theban pieces. This dissertation builds a new typology for coffins from Akhmim, centered around the idea of workshops. It re-evaluates the Akhmim corpus, exploring the key questions of whether the artists were theologically trained and to what degree the scribes were literate. Part One provides the background framework required to understand the next two parts. It reviews the current literature and focuses attention on gaps in our understanding that this dissertation is designed to fill.

Part Two is a catalogue forming the core of this work that consists of an in-depthanalysis of the artistic and scribal hands on twenty-one coffins sets that can be tied to Akhmim by the owner's titles or by museum records of their acquisition--preferably by both. Each individual catalogue entry overviews the provenience and iconographic program of the pieces in a given set, and also provides a paleography of characters occurring on specific elements of the coffin set. An in-depth analysis of the artistic and scribal hands is then undertaken with the aim of answering the questions of how many scribes and artists worked on the individual items in the set, whether the items were decorated by the same people, and whether the scribes were also the artists.

The coffins in the Part Two catalogue are arranged in four broad sections based ongeneral characteristics of the decoration as well as rough dating derived from Theban typologies combined with Brech's typology of Akhmim coffins. At the end of each of these sections, the artistic and scribal hands on the coffins are compared with each other in order to hypothesize which pieces were made by the same artisans. The iconography and layout of the coffins in the section are compared with each other and with pieces in previous sections to propose one or more design patterns--defined as the common layout, selection and positioning of texts and vignettes, which typify products of the same workshop. Artists are then assigned to particular workshops, and the interrelationship between different workshops is discussed. Finally, knowledge of the characteristics of the hands of individual artists and the design patterns governing their products is applied to a large corpus of coffins with unsure or unknown provenience. If possible, these pieces are assigned to one of the workshops as previously defined.

The conclusion, Part Three, reviews and summarizes the results that emerged from thedetailed analysis in Part Two and explores further implications of these findings. In particular, the analysis of Part Two established that a local coffin industry flourished at Akhmim in the 21st Dynasty as well as the period between the late Third Intermediate Period and the Persian Period. During these times, workshops at Akhmim were small, multi-generational enterprises in which each coffin set was decorated by one or two people. Though in some cases there was division of labor between an artist and a scribe, on several coffin sets all the text and figural drawing were executed by the same person. The coffin decorators were likely affiliated with the Temple of Min at Akhmim. A comparison of similar vignettes on coffins of the same workshop reveals that artists were copying models and working from memory. The artists were probably not copying models of full scenes, however, since no two vignettes in the corpus are identical. The variations and substitutions of elements within the vignettes indicate that the artists knew and understood the mythology surrounding rebirth. Similarly, the texts on the coffins were created using a combination of memorization and copying. Captions and formulae were memorized, while specialized funerary texts were most likely copied. Whether the scribes understood what they were writing must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Two of the scribes can be shown to have been literate, one was certainly illiterate, and the rest seem to fall on a spectrum of partial literacy.

This study opens the door to studying regional coffin traditions at other sites andproposes a flexible methodology for doing so. It also builds a foundation for further study of the Akhmim corpus and for exploring how the Akhmim artists might have been connected to artists from elsewhere. Ideally, it challenges the idea that art in the Egyptian provinces was merely derivative of, and inferior to, art originating in Thebes.