Abstract
The Main Tomb of the Great Catacombs at Kom el-Shoqafa ("The Mound of Sherds") in Alexandria represents, as it was already described by Marjorie S. Venit, "the most fully conceived and most singularly convincing Egyptianizing program of any tomb that has yet emerged from the ancient city".
Decorative programme of the tomb has already been discussed several times in modern scholarship, but never in the context of the tomb's anonymous owners. Due to the lack of inscriptions in the tomb, there is no way to ever know the names and specific social background of the deceased, but preserved visual evidence can help us in proposing the origin of their artistic and/or religious preferences.
While it is clear that that the anonymous owners incorporated into their funerary self-presentation traditional Egyptian motifs in both Egyptian and Greek forms, it is also notable that some of the motifs used - such as the Apis bull - come from outside of Alexandria. This paper aims to propose (1) a strong Memphite socio-religious background for the deceased through the analysis of several, apparently deliberately chosen, religious scenes, (2) that the iconographic models for the Kom el-Shoqafa reliefs were apparently taken from the temple ritual referring to the role of the pharaoh, and not from the funerary cult itself, and (3) that the scenes on the back walls of the left and right niches might represent a visualized memory of an actual event, namely the installation of a new Apis bull in the temple of Ptah at Memphis in presence of the future emperor Titus, attested in the account of Suetonius.