How do we even know this person was upper class or some itinerant migrant worker that came from somewhere else?

Even the citation claiming the burial method was associated with upper class raises doubts: following the link mentions "pot burial" which has commonly been associated with the poor. The problem with identifying bones with "population" is it often says what the common man was like but not the minority elite that ruled and had power if one isn't careful about who they think they're identifying or the demographic structure of society in these ancient cultures.

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thaumasiotes 2 days ago | parent [-]

Well, I assume the lowest-budget way to deal with a corpse in ancient Egypt is to toss it into the Nile.

More generally, if what you're looking at is a cemetery for the poor, there should be a lot of remains, and there shouldn't be much in the way of decoration. If someone carved a tomb for the remains to be in ("The body was interred in a ceramic pot within a rock-cut tomb"), that already disqualifies them from being poor.

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andsoitis 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I assume the lowest-budget way to deal with a corpse in ancient Egypt is to toss it into the Nile.

You are wrong to think that the majority of Egyptians’ corpses were disposed of in the Nile.

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thaumasiotes 2 days ago | parent [-]

Is that something I said?

	▲	mrangle a day ago \| parent [-]
		You implied that lower class burials were likely in the Nile. To advance the argument that a pot burial likely didn't indicate a poor burial.

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throwawayffffas 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Culture matters a lot, the lowest budget is not necessarily the one that will be used. The cheapest way to dispose of a body is to eat it, but almost no cultures do that, I don't know the burial rituals of ancient Egyptian laborers, but tossing them in the Nile seems incredibly unlikely.

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PKop 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I assume the lowest-budget way to deal with a corpse in ancient Egypt is to toss it into the Nile.

So what, this didn't happen and isn't consistent with any historical practice. An irrelevant non-sequitur to the question at hand of whether pot burial is likely to be a poor commoner or even migrant worker or some representative of elite Egyptian society.

> that already disqualifies them from being poor.

No it does not, you're extrapolating way to much by way of some modern interpretation there's quite a lot of debate around these particular questions of provenance of remains that you're hand waving and trivializing as clear cut.