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site details
0800-1600 daily
£E18 entry fee
(includes 2 mastabas
and temple)
relevant links
Mastaba of Khasekhemwy
You
can enter the mastabas, but be prepared for a crawl
and carry a flashlight. There are two open mastabas
at Maidum, but they are quite similiar and bereft
of decoration at this point, so we only went into
one.
Actually, considering the effort it took to get into the one, we passed on the other. Don't be fooled by the "there wasn't anything interesting to see" argument...it was purely to avoid the tunnels, trust me!
As mentioned before, I'm not a small person and it took a bit of pushing and pulling to get me through some of these small holes and over the planks inside. . Fateh started to lead us in, got about ten steps down the steeply sloped tunnel, and made us all back out because he "will not fit!". We kept on with the help of the attendant in the tomb.
The tunnels are a little over a meter in places, meaning that we had to bend in half to creep through the space, and in some places we had to lay down and shimmy headfirst into a hole. Mark was honestly better at this that I was, and carried the camera without incident while I ended up covered in dust and whacking my head a half-dozen times.
we had to crawl along the tunnels on planks
(over pretty good drops) to get inside
Finally, the tunnels end several feet underground, in a burial chamber that is bare of all decoration and holds only an enormous granite sarcophagus that must have been lowered into the pit and the mastaba built around it. There were bones found here, but they were jumbled, and no one knows who was buried here.
the granite sarcophagus had already been looted
in antiquity
Other mastabas nearby hold Prince Ra-Hotep, one of Sneferu's sons, and his wife Nofret. Statues of the two can be seen in the museum. The "Maidum Geese" were found in the mastaba of Nefermaat. (Ithink that this may be the same person as Nofret...I'm trying to track that down.)
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