Maarten Raven Maarten Raven Maarten J. Raven (born 1953, Utrecht) is a Dutch Egyptologist. Raven is the curator (since 1978) of the department of Egyptology at the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden. In addition to his work at the museum, he has been active as an archeologist in Saqqara since 1975. In Saqqara, he has been working (as joint field director since 1999) on a New Kingdom archeological burial site, a cooperation of the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden and the Egypt Exploration Society (1975–1998) and Leiden University (1999-) In September 2012 he was also appointed as extraordinary professor 'Museology of Ancient Egypt' at
Christian burial home, the body would be defleshed by boiling or some such other method, and his bones transported back to his estate for burial. In response, in the year 1300, Pope Boniface VIII promulgated a law which excommunicated "ipso facto" anyone who disembowelled bodies of the dead or boiled them to separate the flesh from the bones, for the purpose of transportation for burial in their native land. He further decreed that bodies which had been so treated were to be denied Christian burial. The custom of watching by the dead (the wake) is an ancient practice probably derived from the