‘Daily life scenes’ and their distribution in the post-Amarna New Kingdom tombs: re-evaluating the evidence

The religious themes in tomb decoration during the later New Kingdom has been the focus of many Egyptological studies over the past decades. It is generally believed that, in the aftermath of the Amarna religious reforms, the emphasis in private tomb decoration had shifted from the secular to the sacred realm, from familial relationship to interaction with the divine and the existence of the deceased in the next world. Such a shift came at the expense of some traditionally favoured motifs, of which many had been significantly reduced in number, while others had almost completely disappeared. To such motifs belong the so-called ‘scenes of daily life’. Popular in the decoration of private tombs during the earlier XVIIIth Dynasty, yet nearly extinct from the Amarna private tombs, they are thought to had never regained popularity during the XIXth and XXth Dynasties. Through the analysis of selected ‘daily life scenes’ from private tombs of the late XVIIIth, XIXth and XXth Dynasties, this study aims to investigate whether such claims are true, and to investigate how this change in the distribution of ‘daily life scenes’ can be viewed in with the light of the transformation in religious ideas and concepts of the afterlife in the aftermath of the Amarna revolution.