Depending on the owner’s social position and wealth, his or her tomb could have been either a grand structure, with numerous beautifully decorated rooms, or quite modest, with a simple offering place. Old Kingdom tombs were usually built in the form of so-called mastaba – a rectangular structure, often with its walls slightly inclined. It is inside the mastaba, or adjoining its eastern wall, that the funerary chapel is situated.
The most important element of the funerary structure was the so-called false door, through which the spirit of the deceased comes from the afterworld to enjoy the offerings brought to him by his relatives.
To protect the body from robbers, it was placed in the most inaccessible part of the tomb – in a burial chamber at the bottom of a deep shaft hewn in the bedrock.