BAQAVAT (Al-). - Modern name given to the necropolis of the city of Hibis (1842), metropolis of the Great Oasis. The first scholars who described it (cf. W. de Bock, Matériaux pour servir à l'archéologie de l'Égypte chrétienne, St. Petersburg 1901; P. Karge, Durch die libysche Wüste zur Grossen Oase, Freiburg 1920, pp. 283-322) considered it entirely Christian: but the American excavations of 1907-1908 and 1926 demonstrated that it is instead largely pagan. It was perhaps begun in the middle of the 3rd century and only later used also by Christians. This is also confirmed by the papyri coming from the archive of a local guild of gravediggers and embalmers, from the year 247 to 307, all pagan except one (B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, Greek Papyri, II, Oxford 1897, nos. LXXVII-LXXVIII, pp. 104-25). The pagan mausoleums do not differ from the Christian ones either in architectural forms or in construction technique (cf. W. Hauser, The Christian Necropole in Khargeh Oasis, in Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 27 (1932), pp. 38-50), and it is only the identification of the corpse that can give precise indications. The pagan tombs recognized up to now contain embalmed bodies, enclosed in wooden sarcophagi painted with scenes and symbols of Egyptian mythology: we cannot therefore for now consider as certainly Christian any but those aediculae that present themselves as such through their decoration or through the inscriptions painted or scratched on the walls (on the inscriptions of the necropolis see G. Lefebvre, in Annales du Service des Antiquités de l'Égypte, 9 (1908), pp. 179-83; A. Jacoby, Zur der «Ammonier», Inschrift der Grossen Oase in der Libyschen Wüste, in Byzant.-Neugriechische Jahrbücher, 1 (1920), pp. 148-150), awaiting exhaustive excavations that may enable us to determine exactly the history of the cemetery. This is composed of ca. 250 mausoleums arranged in two groups that come together to the north near a large building, which is probably a small basilica with three naves, surrounded by service and dwelling rooms, perhaps monastic. The mausoleums are generally square aediculae, with the door to the south and sometimes a small apse to the east, covered by a dome on pendentives and more rarely by a flat roof: at other times they are circular or octagonal. There are then rectangular mausoleums covered with a barrel vault, in some cases interrupted in the middle by a dome. The walls are decorated externally with blind arcades supported by pilasters or half-columns leaning against the facing. The perimeter walls rise above the springing of the dome, which generally remains hidden, and are decorated at the top by an openwork frieze of triangles. The building material is unbaked brick: only the architraves of the doors were of wood or stone. The walls were plastered with fine silt and whitewashed. At the sides of the doors one sees triangular niches to hold lamps. Important paintings decorate, besides the large building mentioned above, three of the Christian mausoleums: the one called of the biblical scenes, the one of the allegorical figures and the one of the vine decoration.
Bibliography4 works
Ugo Monneret de Villard
BAR: ANTIVARI.