The hypogee

It’s the third kind of the Egyptian tomb with the mastaba and the pyramid. The ipogeo is an underground burial, dug beside the calcareous walls of the valley of the Nile up to the Delta. The basic principles concerning the concept of the burial are rather unchanged regarding other sepulchral constructions. In the ipogeo in an offering chamber or a chapel, there were the offering tables, the niche for the funeral statue and the stele. In another room, hermetically closed, the mummy lay in its sarcophagus. Already since the end of the Ancient Reign, the governors of the nomoi and of the distant territories, as Elefantina, obtained, under the I Dynasty, the permission to be buried in their provinces. As they had obtained a certain authority over their domains, the nobles, during the first intermediate period, were buried in an hypogee, which during the Middle Reign had a success almost equal to the mastaba. During the New Reign the ipogeo became the kind of burial preferred by the pharaohs, who so ordered to excavate their eternal homes, beginning the Valley of the Kings.