Tomb models from Meketre’s burial are among the most complete pictures we have of Middle Kingdom work. This granary is a building in miniature, with laborers, grain, and scribes who sit above the store recording what comes in. The afterlife needed bread. Bread needed accounting.
That is a colder poetry than star ceilings, and it belongs in this gallery anyway. Egyptian funerary art is not only boats on the night river. It is logistics. Someone had to count. The scribes on the roof are Thoth’s office staff, even if no ibis is carved here.
The model also explains why writing and the cosmos share a room in Mercury 91. Orbits are counts. Calendars are counts. A personal night record is a count of hours you do not want to lose. The granary says: if you want a world to continue, you measure it.
Painted wood is fragile. The fact that this object survived is part of its meaning. Tomb equipment was meant to work forever in another world. We see it in this one, still doing the job of showing how a house of grain was also a house of records.
