Cast, Sacrificial Chamber of Merib

With three burial chambers from the time of the Pyramids, Berlin possesses a unique wealth of the material artefacts of everyday life from around 2600 to 2300 BC that is unmatched in the other museums of the world. Scenes of men and women working in crafts and agriculture, together with representations of all manner of flora and fauna, combine to form a pictorial encyclopaedia of the world of the Nile Valley in ancient times. The central element of the organisation of the walls is the false door, behind which the shaft of the tomb led deep down into the rock to the chamber containing the sarcophagus. In the display in the Neues Museum, the walls of the small chambers are far enough apart to allow people to enter. Evacuated or bricked up to protect them from bomb damage after 1939, today they can be ‘discovered’ as if they had only just been excavated.