A Border Between Worlds: The Ancient Egyptian Tomb as a Borderscape

This paper reframes the ancient Egyptian tomb as a borderscape, focusing on evidence from the 3rd millennium BCE—known as the Old Kingdom and the First Intermediate Period. While the identification of the tomb as a border between the worlds of the living and the dead is not new in modern scholarship, the actual implications of the tomb as a border, and its possible consequences for human interactions within, and through, the tomb, are yet to be analyzed in depth. The concept of borderscape, a polysemic term first established in border studies, recenters the tomb as an active place of convergence and of community building, a place where the social and political order can simultaneously be maintained and subverted. The tomb is understood as a complex stage where human feelings, emotions, and interactions are experienced, intertwined, and intensified, offering a more humanized and reflective view of the ancient experience of these monuments. Funerary rituals, inscriptions, and iconographic programs are thus interpreted as acts of bordering that sustained the tomb as both a physical and a symbolic threshold between two distinct but interconnected realities. By reframing the tomb as a borderscape, this paper aims to provide a theoretical and analytical instrument that highlights the fact that the tomb was not a neutral space, emphasizing the ongoing practices through which boundaries between worlds, identities, and social orders were negotiated and maintained—not just within, but because of, the tomb space.