In Predynastic Egypt – as, indeed, in many ancient civilisations – much of life revolved around death. The concept that the lives of human beings are extinguishable, that, by its very nature, no person alive can accurately report what happens after this demise, was a source of great existential angst for many ancient societies. The various and imaginative ways through which they dealt with this angst are one of the principle areas of study for archaeologists, primarily because the remains left behind after death are the most easily accessible archaeological finds, since they are often deliberately buried and untouched. Nowhere is this truer than in Egypt. Once thought of as a civilisation without cities, the Egyptians were at one stage known only from tombs and temples. Urban settlements have only begun to be systematically studied in the last century or so, resulting in a patchy and confused understanding of ordinary daily life which contrasts with our detailed knowledge of funerary and religious practices. For the Predynastic in particular, our knowledge remains dominated by the funerary practices, supplemented by comparisons with our knowledge of later Egyptian periods.

In the later Egyptian worldview, which all the evidence indicates prevailed in some form in the Predynastic, the soul (akh) was a multipartite conception, which existed in parallel with the body (khaw, a plural word meaning ‘the sum of the bodily parts’). The funerary texts reference eight elements to the soul: kht (physical body), sah (spiritual body), rn (the spoken name, identity), ba (personality, individuality), ka (‘double’, the vital essence), ib (the heart, seat of knowledge and emotion), shut (the shadow), and skhm (the ‘power’). These elements existed in an interconnected way, and all eight were necessary in some way to enter the afterlife. The importance of the kht, for example, ensured that the Egyptians went to great extents to ensure the preservation of the physical body, originally natural forms of preservation in the dry sands of the desert but eventually through the artificial process of mummification. Two of the most important elements – the ka and ba – were considered to become corporeal following death, and required sustenance in perpetuity thereafter.

In the tomb, then, the ka (and to a lesser extent, the ba) required food and drink in order to survive. These were provided both in the form of goods buried with the deceased, but also in offerings made daily to the spirits of the deceased. Later, these offerings were made in a chapel associated with the tomb, a publicly accessible part of the tomb infrastructure. But in the Predynastic, offerings were probably made in the open air, near the burial itself. Given that most burials occurred in simple pits, with no superstructure, there was no way of guaranteeing the survival of the goods buried with the deceased. Stone vessels were the answer to this problem: whereas the pottery vessels of everyday life were easily broken, stone vessels were durable enough to sustain the ka in perpetuity. While most of these stone vessels were associated with the physical sustenance of the ka, it should be noted that the Egyptians did not believe in mere survival. For the Egyptians, life was – at least in part – about pleasure (htpw), which was considered a gift from the gods. Obsessed with sensory enjoyment, the Egyptians esteemed scent (khnm), appearance, flavour, touch and comfort. As a result a great many of the vessels interred with Predynastic Egyptians were designed to contain perfumes, oils, unguents and cosmetics. In many cases, these vessels were dramatically oversized, reflecting the desire of the individual to enjoy abundance in the afterlife. Even if the vessel was empty, as was often the case, the mere presence of the appropriate container could ensure that the ka was well provided-for.

Stone vessels also resolved the problem of what happens if the deceased’s family line were to become extinct. Thanks to the persistent Egyptian belief that a substitute could be magically imbued with the spirit and function of a real thing, the Egyptians were able to create stone vessels designed to look as though filled with goods necessary for the afterlife, by whose very presence – even if empty – the ka and the ba could be sustained. It is in this tradition that this remarkable granite vessel falls. A slender example of the shouldered vases so esteemed by the Egyptians, the vessel rises from a flat round foot, through a narrow base, up to a dramatic flaring shoulder, and thence inwards to a very short neck and a strongly everted disc rim. The aperture is relatively narrow, and the whole vessels seems to have been designed with pouring in mind; it is probable, than, that this is a substitute wine, beer, or Nile water vessel. The weight of the foot prevents the vase from toppling easily, and demonstrates the Egyptian knack for producing vessels with precise balance in mind. The inside has been hollowed with a hand drill, the bow and shaft of which form the hieroglyph for ‘craftsman’ (hemutyu), reflecting the importance of stone vessels in the Egyptian mindset.

References: this vessel corresponds to Petrie’s Type No. 577 (Petrie, W. M. F. (1937) The Funeral Furniture of Egypt, with Stone and Metal Vases. London.).