Herodotos, the well-travelled Greek aristocrat whose book, The Histories, is considered the first analytical exploration of the human past, claimed that the Egyptians were obsessed with death. He reports, for example, that at the end of Egyptian dinner-parties – an altogether more sedate affair than their Greek counterparts – a painted coffin or effigy of a dead man was brought around to all the guests by a servant, after which the host proclaims ‘look upon this body as you drink, and enjoy yourself; for you will be just like it when you are dead’ (Herodotos The Histories 2.78.1). While Herodotos probably exaggerates, there can be no doubt that death, or more correctly, provision for the afterlife, was a hugely important aspect of Egyptian culture. Wealthy Egyptians went to great extents, for example, to preserve their physical bodies through the practice of mummification. This practice, based on the belief that the spirit (ka) would still need to make use of the body after death, was reflected in the array of grave goods interred with Egyptians. Following death, the Egyptians believed that the spirit needed sustenance to continue to exist. The ka inhabited a statue in the tomb chapel. There, offerings were left to enable the ka to continue indefinitely into the afterlife. The family of the deceased would visit the chapel regularly, bringing offerings and libations. These were not limited to food and water; families brought everything they thought the dead might need to enjoy themselves in the afterlife. The Egyptians especially esteemed pleasant smells, and so flowers and perfumes were often dedicated at the tomb, and interred with the dead.

While Egyptian tombs were sealed with hidden entrances, tomb chapels were the public and visible expression of the family’s devotion towards the dead. The chapel was explicitly open to the living, richly decorated with images of the deceased and the existence they hoped to enjoy in the Netherworld. In the Old Kingdom, the tomb chapel was associated with the characteristic non-royal tomb type, the mastaba. Derived from an Arabic word for ‘bench’, the mastaba was a flat-topped tomb of rectangular plan, with gently sloping sides. Inside these tombs, a public area, the tomb chapel, was housed in the above-ground superstructure, but the burial chamber itself was concealed underneath, in a stone-lined subterranean chamber. Within the tomb chapel, family members would place offerings on special surfaces – tables, altars and decorated stone slabs – in order to present them to the ka. This exquisitely designed round offering table is of a type known from tombs of the Old Kingdom, the first period of Egypt’s political unity and cultural fluorescence. They first appear during the Second Dynasty, known mostly for its final and powerful king Khasekhemwy, and remained in use until the collapse of the Sixth Dynasty some four hundred years later. This was the classical form of the offering table: a circular surface, which sits on a flared cylindrical foot. The two are often constructed separately, but in this case – as in other especially fine examples, such as Fondation Gandur pour l’art FGA-ARCH-EG-0222 – the entire structure is carved from a single block of alabaster.

A significant number of these tables were found during one campaign of digging in AD 1911, conducted by Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in Giza, the site of the Great Pyramids. There, in the non-royal necropolis, offering tables abounded. From the context of the tombs in which they were found, these tables were a kind of upper and middle class luxury, available to even the relatively ordinary – not royal, but still wealthy enough to commission a mastaba tomb. The finds discovered alongside them, however, reveal that not all of them were designed to be used as offering tables on a day-to-day basis. One example, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (37.1315), was discovered stacked with alabaster surrogates of real food offerings, including a delicious-looking and quite lifelike roasted quail. By donating stone substitutes on this sacred platter, the family of the deceased guaranteed that offerings would be present for his ka in perpetuity, even if the family line was extinguished, or for some other reason rituals could no longer be performed daily at his tomb chapel.

References: examples of similarly-formed alabaster offering tables can be found in London (British Museum EA22832; Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology UC30725), Boston (Museum of Fine Arts 27.1469, 06.1883, 11.2394, 11.3181, 31.1315), New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art 32.1173), and Geneva (Fondation Gandur pour l’art FGA-ARCH-EG-0222).