Provincial governors in the Middle Kingdom continued to be buried in decorated
rock-cut tombs in their local cemeteries, carried over from the
First Intermediate Period, at sites such as Beni Hasan. In the lower cemetery there are 888 shaft tombs, dating to the Middle Kingdom, that were excavated by
John Garstang; for the most part these tombs shared a similar general design which included a small chamber or recess at the foot of the shaft (facing south) to receive the coffin and the funeral deposits. In the upper cemetery members of the elite class built striking tombs to represent their social and political positions as the rulers and officials of the Oryx Nome, which is the 16th Nome of Upper Egypt. At this site, the provincial high elite were buried in large and elaborately decorated tombs carved into the limestone cliffs near the provincial capital, located in the upper cemetery area. These tombs lie in a row on a north–south axis. There is a slight break in the natural rock terrace, on to which they open, that divides the thirty-nine high status tombs into two groups. The basic design of these elite tombs was an outer court and a rock-cut pillared room (sometimes referred to as the chapel) in which there was a shaft that led to the burial chamber. Some of the larger tombs have biographical inscriptions and were painted with scenes of daily life and warfare. They are famous for the quality of their paintings. Many of these scenes are in poor condition, though in the 19th century copies were made of several of them. Howard Carter as a teenager 1891 spent a season painting watercolours of some of them. In 2020,
Martin Bommas identified all four walls of the
First Intermediate Period burial chamber of the governor
Baqet II in tomb BH33 as being inscribed with
Pyramid Texts and
Coffin Texts in the
Hieratic script which served the tomb owner as a ritual handbook, published in 2022. This discovery marked a breakthrough in the understanding of the transmission of
Pyramid Texts after the downfall of the
Old Kingdom. ==Notable tombs==