The rock-cut tombs or hypogea named after the Anfushy Bay to the north likely belonged to a larger necropolis on the former island of Pharos, along with the slightly younger tombs at Ras el Tin a bit further to the west. The tombs of the Anfushy complex all roughly follow the same form: after descending a subterranean staircase, one reaches a courtyard which is open to the air above. Attached to the courtyard are up to three long and narrow rooms, in the walls of which were often dug loculi, rectangular holes for the interment of bodies and urns. Beyond these rooms tended to lay another smaller room which could hold a sarcophagus, altar, or shrine (naiskos).
Notably, in the case of Tomb 2, which dates to the middle or second half of the second century BCE, the painted decorations of one of the rooms had at one point been replaced by a new design, likely in the first century BCE. As the older decorations had merely been stuccoed and painted over, they could be revealed once more, allowing us to follow changes in Alexandrian artistic taste. Tomb 2, likely dating to the same period, features a painted depiction of the falcon-headed god Horus (along with two human-headed gods) greeting a deceased person, a very early instance of a work of art in Egyptian style in the Alexandrian catacombs. Tomb 5, dated to the first century BCE, includes a room with wall-paintings all around of trompe l'oeil pilasters, between which are depicted trees, as if one stares out into a garden.1
Referenzen
- ↑M.S. Venit, Monumental Tombs of Ancient Alexandria: The Theatre of the Dead (Cambridge 2002) 73-90, 199-200.