Read Ebook: Ten years' digging in Egypt 1881-1891 by Petrie W M Flinders William Matthew Flinders

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town, underlaid by a bed of ashes, which apparently showed that the first settlement outside of the camp was a cluster of mere booths. Here I found a scarab factory, where they had made the scarabs of white and blue paste, so well known in Greek cemeteries in Rhodes and elsewhere. Hundreds of earthenware moulds and many scarabs were unearthed, and this factory is the leading point for dating the early town. The work of the scarabs is manifestly a Greek imitation of Egyptian style; and the names of the kings upon them show the dates to come down to the time of Uah-ab-ra , but not a single example of Amasis was found, proving the factory to have been extinct before his time. Probably the great defeat of the Greek troops by Amasis was a severe blow to Greek work for the time; although Naukratis reaped the benefit of the annihilation of the other Greek centres , by being tolerated and having the exclusive privilege of trade. The first autonomous coin of Naukratis yet known was found in the town; with heads of Naukratis and of the hero Alexander.

The old town had been so laid bare by the native diggers, that it was possible to form a tolerable plan of the streets and houses. The street lines were distinguished by the rubbish thrown out, mostly remains of food, shells, and bones; while in later times, from the fifth century, the streets were regularly mended with limestone chips and dust; and often one may trace the section of a puddle hole filled up with chips and levelled. Among the houses many fine pieces of vases were found, and a small hoard of early Greek silver coins and lumps of silver. But the most interesting matter was the history of tools, shown by the variety of iron tools; we here meet, for the first time, what may be looked on as practically our modern forms of chisels, &c.; and we see what a debt we owe to European invention, when we compare these with the bronze tools of the Egyptians which preceded them.

The cemetery has not yet been entirely found; a portion of it, mainly of the Alexandrine age, was cleared by Mr. Gardner, on a low mound to the north of the town, alongside of the canal; but it was not rich, and the principal objects were the Medusa heads, moulded in terra cotta, which were affixed to the wooden coffins. Probably the greater part of it is beneath the modern village.

The potteries of Naukratis were famous in the time of Athenaios, and long before that also, as we see by the great heaps of burnt earth and potters' waste, and by the distinctive style of much of the early pottery. On comparing the characteristic styles of this place with those of Defenneh, also inhabited by Greeks of the same period, it is plain that most of the vases found were made here by a local school of potters. And though the clay is apparently of Greek origin, yet it would be immeasurably easier to import a ton of clay as ballast in a boat, than to move about a thousand brittle and bulky vases.

We will now sum up the results of this discovery, in its general connection with other antiquities. The site now found fills a gap in Egyptian geography; and it shows us how the Greeks were posted near the capital of that age,--Sais, but toward the Libyan frontier, where defence was needed; moreover they dwelt on a canal, which could be used by Greek traders at all seasons of the year, and which kept them apart from the Egyptians on the Nile. The plan of the town shows the fort, which became the

Panhellenion, with a settlement extending along the bank of the canal for half a mile below it; amidst which stood the temples of the separate external colonies of traders, Milesian, Samian, and Aeginetan. The dedications found on the vases have been much discussed; but, viewed in the light of the history of the town, they are generally agreed now to be probably the earliest Ionic writing yet known. The styles of the vases made here are now fixed, and those found in other places which were exported from here can be identified; similarly we now know the source of the paste scarabs of mock-Egyptian design, often found in Greek tombs. The history of vase-painting is assisted by the successive periods of the layers of the Apollo remains, which extend over what was a doubtful age; and the history of tools and of Greek manufactures has been much extended. On almost every side this fresh view of the early sojourn of the Greeks in Egypt has consolidated and enlarged our knowledge; and given for the first time an actual insight into three centuries most important in their bearing on Greek development, and for which we were entirely dependent hitherto on literature and tradition.

DAPHNAE--TAHPANHES.

When I was exploring in the marshy desert about Tanis, I saw from the top of a mound--Tell Ginn--a shimmering grey swell on the horizon through the haze; and that I was told was Tell Defenneh, or rather Def'neh, as it is called. It was generally supposed to be the Pelusiac Daphnae of Herodotos, and the Tahpanhes of the Old Testament; but nothing definite was known about it, and as it lies in the midst of the desert, between the Delta and the Suez Canal, twelve miles from either, it was not very accessible. After working at Tell Nebesheh for some time, I left it in Mr. Griffith's hands, and told my men that I wanted to work at Defneh; immediately I had more volunteers than I could employ, and I went into the desert to the work with a party of forty,--men, boys and girls,--and formed a settlement which enlarged up to seventy. We pitched on the old Pelusiac branch, which is now rather brackish, and it was sometimes difficult to drink the water: the people, however, made the best of it, and I never had a pleasanter time with my men than the two months I lived there, independent of all the local authorities which are generally met with. No one was allowed about the camp except the workers, and I never had the least trouble with them, nor heard a single squabble.

This place then appears to have been an old fort on the Syrian frontier guarding the road out of Egypt; and here Psamtik settled part of his 'brazen men from the sea,' and built a great fortress and camp, the twin establishment to that of the rest of the Greek mercenaries at Naukratis, on the Libyan side. The fort was a square mass of brickwork, with deep domed chambers or cells in it, which were opened from the top; this sustained the actual dwellings at about forty feet above the plain, so that a clear view of the distant

towns and the desert could be seen over the camp wall, to some ten or twenty miles. The camp was defended by a wall forty feet thick, and probably as high; but this is now completely swept away down to the ground by the winds and rains. Beneath each corner of the fort was placed a set of plaques of various materials, both metals and stones, with the name of Psamtik, and at the south-west corner were also the bones of a sacrifice and other ceremonial deposits. This fort was enlarged by chambers added to it during a couple of generations later; and it must have been over that threshold which still lies in the doorway that the Jewish fugitives entered, when Hophra gave them an asylum from the Assyrian scourge. We cannot doubt that Tahpanhes--the first place on the road into Egypt--was a constant refuge for the Jews during the series of Assyrian invasions; especially as they met here, not the exclusive Egyptians, but a mixed foreign population, mostly Greeks. Here then was a ready source for the introduction of Greek words and names into Hebrew, long before the Alexandrine age; and even before the fall of Jerusalem the Greek names of musical instruments, and other words, may have been heard in the courts of Solomon's temple.

The Greek vases found here show us an entirely new type, derived from the form of the Egyptian metal vases, but with the pointed base replaced by a circular foot. The painting and style of these vases are also unknown elsewhere, and were never found at Naukratis, so that it is certain that they were made by Daphniote potters. Several other styles of vases are found here, but it is very remarkable to note the total difference from the pottery of Naukratis. If the vases had been mainly imported to these settlements in Egypt, we should certainly find the remains much alike in two towns both occupied by Ionians at the same period, and probably trading with the same places; whereas every style that is most common at either of these towns is almost or entirely unknown at the other town. Such a widespread distinction shows how largely the pottery was made by local schools of potters, at the place where we find it, and how little of it was carried by trade.

The decoration of some of the vases is surprising, as showing at what an early date some patterns were used. On one vase are two bands of design, one of the archaic square volute, and the other of the lotus or 'palmetto' pattern, which would otherwise have been supposed to be a century later.

The greater part of the vase fragments were found in two chambers of the out-buildings of the fort. These rooms had been standing unused by the Greeks, and served for rubbish holes, so that when we cleared them out every scrape of the earth brought up some painted fragments, and the lucky workmen who had these places filled basket after basket each day. The finest vase of all was found alone, in a passage on the north of the fort, and nearly every fragment

was secured, ninety-nine pieces in all; it had been very probably a present to the Egyptian governor, or possibly to the king on some visit there, as it had traces of an inscription in demotic written on it with ink.

The ground of the camp also supplied us with a large number of things; for although it would hardly be worth while to dig over so many acres exhaustively, yet the ground had been so much denuded that the surface-dust was rich in small objects. I therefore had it scraped over, and found hundreds of arrow-heads of iron and bronze, iron scale armour, swords, &c. One curious find was turned up the last afternoon of the work; a large lot of cut-up lumps of silver, and a massive gold handle off a tray, with lotus 'palmetto' design; it had been violently wrenched off, and the question is where would a soldier have a chance of looting such valuable gold plate of Egyptian design? It seems not unlikely that it was part of the royal treasure of Apries, plundered on his overthrow by Amasis. Another unusual object was picked up by one of the workmen on the surface ; it appeared to be a little silver box with a sliding lid. The lid was slightly opened, and the feet of a gold figure showed inside it. As it could not be opened more without breaking it, I carefully cracked out one side, and took from it a most beautiful little statuette of Ra, hawk-headed, and then restored the case again. It had evidently been a shrine to wear on a necklace, as there was a loop at the back of the box.

Although all the stone buildings had been destroyed, and lines of chips alone remained to show the sandstone and limestone of their construction, yet the larger part of a great stele of sandstone still lies there, bearing a long hieroglyphic inscription. It is evident therefore that Egyptian interests were not neglected, and that there must have been both Egyptian and Greek living side by side, together with Phoenician and Jew. One curious class of Egyptian remains

has given us the dates of some parts of the building; for the plaster sealings of the wine jars bear the cartouches of the king, and they were most likely knocked off and thrown aside within a few years of being sealed. One room seemed to have belonged to the royal butler, for dozens of plaster sealings of Psamtik were found together there. A jar had been fraudulently opened by boring through the plaster, and the pottery stopper below it, and then stopping the hole with fresh plaster. The prudent butler had struck off the whole neck of the jar, so as to preserve the proofs of the theft entire. The particularity of the sealing is remarkable; first the pottery bung was tied down, and the string sealed on clay by six inspectors; then a plaster cap was put over all that, and marked with the royal cartouche in several places.

The ruin of all this community came suddenly. Apries trusted to the Greek mercenaries, and defied the old Egyptian party ; and Amasis, who had married the royal princess , took the national side, and ousted his brother-in-law. Civil war was the consequence, and the Greeks--though straining all their power--were completely crushed by Amasis. He then carried out the protective policy of Egypt, and depopulated Daphnae, and all other Greek settlements excepting Naukratis, which latter thus became the only treaty-port open to Greek merchants. Hence, as we can date the founding of Defenneh almost to a year, about 665 B.C., when Psamtik established his mercenary camps, so we can also date its fall to a year in 564 B.C. when Amasis struck down the Greek trade. And this just accords with what we find, as there is a sudden cessation of Greek pottery at a stage someway before the introduction of red figured ware, which took place about 490 B.C.

It appears likely that as Naukratis was the home of the scarab trade to Greece, so Daphnae was the home of the jewellery trade, and the source of the semi-Egyptian jewellery so often found in Greek tombs. Much evidence of the goldsmith's work was discovered; pieces of gold ornaments, pieces partly wrought, globules and scraps of gold, and a profusion of minute weights, such as would only be of use for precious metals.

We see then that Daphnae is the complement of Naukratis: they were twin cities, and teach us even more by their contrasts than their resemblances. We again reach back, as at Naukratis, through the pre-Alexandrine period to the foundation of Greek power in Egypt. We again find the interaction of Greek and Egyptian civilization. We again see the rise of a local school of pottery, and have the great advantage of its being confined to just a century, of which we know the exact limits. On the Jewish side of the history the arrangement of 'the king's house in Tahpanhes' exactly explains the narrative; the very name of the place echoes the sojourn of the fugitive heiresses of Judah; and a valuable light is thrown on the early contact of the Hebrew race with the language and thought of the Greeks with whom they here dwelt.

NEBESHEH.

While living at Tanis I heard of a great stone, and a cemetery, some miles to the south of that place, and took an opportunity of visiting it. The site, Tell Nebesheh, is a very out-of-the-way spot; marshes and canals cut it off from the rest of the delta; and the only path to it from the cultivated region is across a wide wet plain, on the other side of which is a winding bank hidden among the reeds of the bogs, and only to be found by a native. After leaving Naukratis I went to this place, to try to clear up its history; and Mr. Griffith finished the work here, after I had moved on to fresh discoveries. The great stone was seen to be a monolith shrine, and therefore probably a temple lay around it. As I walked over the mounds, I saw that the tufts of reedy grass came to an end along a straight line, the other side of which was bare earth. This pointed out the line of the enclosing wall of the temple, which I soon tracked round on all sides. In the middle of one side the mound dipped down, and a few limestone chips lay about. Here I dug for the entrance pylon, and before long we found the lower stones of it left in position; on clearing it out a statue of Ramessu II, larger than life, was found, and fragments of its fellow; also a sphinx, likewise in black granite, which had been so often reappropriated by various kings, that the original maker could hardly be traced. Probably of the twelfth dynasty to begin with, it had received a long inscription around the base from an official , and later on six other claimants seized it in succession. Outside of the pylon there had been an approach, of which one ornament remained; this is an entirely fresh design, being a column without any capital, but supporting a large hawk overshadowing the king Merenptah, who kneels before it. The sides of the column are inscribed.

But it was evident that some temple had existed here before Aahmes, as the monuments were of earlier ages; and on looking at the plan it is seen that his temple is not in the middle of the enclosure, nor is it in the line of the axis, but at right angles to it. I therefore searched for the first temple about the midst of the area, but for a long time nothing appeared besides chips. At last a mass of sand was found with a vertical face, and this I at once recognised as the sand bed laid in the earth, on which the walls of the temple had been founded. It was covered with about twelve feet of dust and chips, but by sinking pits at intervals it was traced all round the whole extent of the former temple. The foundation deposits were unattainable, as they were too deep beneath the water level, and the great sand bed collects the water so readily that it could not be kept down more than three feet by baling.

The cemetery was the other object at this place. It proved to be of tolerable extent, about half a mile long; but the earliest tomb found was of Ramesside age. Most of the burials were of the twenty-sixth to the thirtieth dynasties, and the rarity of earlier interments was explained by the condition of those which remain. The tomb chambers were all subterranean, yet most of them were found roofless, though level with the ground; of some, only a few bricks remained at the sides; very few were still complete with a brick vault. In fact they were in every stage of removal, owing to the denudation of the sand ground in which they were placed. The inference is only too evident, that the earlier tombs have simply been denuded wholly away, below the last brick of the walls. Many of the chambers were excavated, but only in a few of them were any ushabti figures found. Some of them were sumptuous buildings of limestone; but mostly they were of the mud bricks, both in the walls and the arched roofing. The most interesting class were those of Lykaonian mercenaries; most likely from an outpost of the Daphnae camp, stationed here. In those tombs there were no ushabtis; the bodies lay north and south, instead of east and west, as in the Egyptian tombs; there were bronze and sometimes iron spear-heads, and curious forked spear-heads, like that on a funeral stele at Iconium; and moreover, Cypriote pottery, generally pilgrim bottles.

While working in the cemetery we found one unrifled tomb, containing four mummies, with their sets of amulets intact. These I carefully took off the bodies, noting the position of every object, so that I could afterwards rearrange them in their original order exactly as found. But the greatest discovery here in point of size was a great tomb formed by a brick-walled yard or enclosure sunk in the ground. Within this were two limestone sarcophagi inscribed, and a splendid basalt sarcophagus, highly wrought, and with a long inscription; this was encased in a huge block of limestone for protection, and it required much work to break this away when Count D'Hulst removed it to London. These sarcophagi were for a family who held offices in the Egyptian town of Am; another sarcophagus found near these also named Am, and a piece of a statuette from the temple gave the same name. From these many different sources it appears that Am was the name of Tell Nebesheh; especially as Uati was the goddess of Am, and hers was the statue of the great shrine and temple here. This gives a fresh point in the geography of ancient Egypt, and explains what Herodotos means by the Arabian Buto, in contrast to the other Buto in the western half of the delta.

UP THE NILE.

When in the end of 1886 I went to Egypt, I had no excavations in prospect, having bid good-bye to the Fund; but I had promised to take photographs for the British Association, and I had much wished to see Upper Egypt in a more thorough way than during a hurried dahabiyeh trip to Thebes in 1882. To this end my friend Mr. Griffith joined me. We hired a small boat with a cabin at Minia, and took six weeks wandering up to Assuan, walking most of the way in and out of the line of cliffs. Thus we saw much that is outside of the usual course, and spent afterwards ten days at Assuan, and three weeks at Thebes, in tents. On coming down the Nile I walked along the eastern shore from Wasta to Memphis, but found it a fruitless region. Lastly, I lived several weeks at Dahshur, for surveying the pyramids there.

Assuan proved a most interesting district, teeming with early inscriptions cut on the rocks; and to copy all of these was a long affair. Every day we went out with rope-ladder, bucket, and squeeze-paper, as early as we could, and returned in the dusk; so at last some two hundred inscriptions were secured, many of which were of importance, and quite unnoticed before. These carvings are some of them notices of royal affairs, but mostly funereal lists of offerings for the benefit of various deceased persons. They abound most in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth dynasties, though some of them are later; and one records queen Amenardus, and another Psamtik II, of the twenty-sixth dynasty. Their main interest is in the great number of personal names which they preserve, and the relationships stated. We see that the father is often not named at all, and the father's family is scarcely ever noticed; while on the mother's side the relations extend even to second cousins. To decipher these records is sometimes a hard matter, when they are very rudely chipped--or rather bruised--on the rough granite rocks; and continually we used to consult and dispute about some sign for long enough to copy all the rest of the inscription. Some of them are, however, beautifully engraved, and quite monumental in style. The most striking, perhaps, is a rock on the island of Elephantine, which had never been noticed before, although in the pathway. It was a sort of royal album begun by Ra-kha-nefer ; followed by Unas , who carved a handsome tablet. Then Ra-meri Pepi appropriated Ra-kha-nefer's inscription; Ra-nefer-ka Pepi next carved a tablet; in later times, of the eleventh dynasty, Antef-aa II followed with another tablet; and lastly Amenemhat I placed the sixth inscription here.

On the desert hills behind Esneh I found what is--so far--the oldest thing known from Egypt. In prehistoric days the Nile used to fill the whole breadth of the valley, to a depth of a couple of hundred feet, fed with the heavy rainfall that carved back the valleys all along the river by great waterfalls, the precipices of which now stand stark and arid in the bleaching sun. Many parts of the valley are above the present river, and are now desert, so that at Esneh the hills are several miles from the Nile, and on a spur of one--where probably no man sets foot for

centuries at a time--I found lying a palaeolithic wrought flint. It was about a couple of hundred feet above the Nile, and being clearly a river-worn object, it had been left there in the old time of the Great Nile. The flints found by General Pitt-Rivers at Thebes belong to a later age, when the Nile had fallen to almost its present level. But those are far older than any monuments known to us. We see then two stages before the beginning of what we can call history.

At Thebes my main work was in obtaining casts and photographs of all the types of foreign races on the monuments. For making ethnographical comparisons we were, until then, dependent on drawings, which were often incorrect. Now we have nearly two hundred photographs, all with the same size of head, giving several examples of each race that was represented by the Egyptians.

Having finished the Theban work, I then went to Dahshur, and there made a survey around the two large pyramids; but unfortunately I could not obtain the permission to uncover the bases of the pyramids in time to measure more than the southern one. This pyramid is interesting, as it retains the original casing over most of it, and gives us some idea of what the other pyramids looked like before the plundering by Arabs, and perhaps older thieves. The outside is peculiar, as being of a steeper angle below than above, and hence it is often called the 'blunted pyramid.' The results of the survey were that it was all designed in even numbers of cubits. The base was 360 cubits, the height 200, divided into 90 cubits steep, and 110 cubits of flatter slope. The space walled in around it was 100 cubits wide. Another small pyramid on the south of it was 100 cubits square.

HAWARA.

A short work of a few days at Biahmu resolved the questions about the so-called pyramids there. So soon as we began to turn over the soil we found chips of sandstone colossi; the second day the gigantic nose of a colossus was found, as broad as a man's body; then pieces of carved thrones, and a fragment

Having by this time formed and organised a good body of workmen, I moved over to Hawara, with as many men as I wanted; and the only difficulty was to restrain the numbers who wished to work. The pyramid had never been entered in modern times, and its arrangement was wholly unknown; explorers had fruitlessly destroyed much of the brickwork on the north side, but yet the entrance was undiscovered. In Roman times the stone casing had been removed, and as the body of the structure was of mud bricks, it had crumbled away somewhat; each side was therefore encumbered with chips and mud. After vainly searching the ground on the north side for any entrance, I then cleared the middle of the east side, but yet no trace of any door could be found. As it was evident then that the plan was entirely different to that of any known pyramid, and it would be a hopeless task to clear all the ground around it, I therefore settled to tunnel to the midst. This work was very troublesome, as the large bricks were laid in sand, and rather widely spaced; hence as soon as any were removed, the sand was liable to pour out of the joints, and to loosen all the surrounding parts. The removal of each brick was therefore done as quietly as possible, and I had to go in three times a day and insert more roofing boards, a matter which needed far more skill and care than a native workman would use. After many weeks' work , I found that we were halfway through, but all in brick. On one side of the tunnel, however, I saw signs of a built wall, and guessing that it had stood around the pit made for the chamber during the building, I examined the rock-floor, and found that it sloped down slightly, away from the wall. We turned then to the west, and tunnelling onwards, we reached the great roofing beams of the chamber in a few days. No masons of the district, however, could cut through them, and I had to leave the work till the next season. Then, after a further search on all the four sides for the entrance, the masons attacked the sloping stone roof, and in two or three weeks' time a hole beneath them was reported; anxiously I watched them enlarge it until I could squeeze through, and then I entered the chamber above the sepulchre; at one side I saw a lower hole, and going down I found a broken way into the sandstone sepulchre, but too narrow for my shoulders. After sounding the water inside it, a boy was put down with a rope-ladder; and at last, on looking through the hole, I could see by the light of his candle the two sarcophagi, standing rifled and empty. In a day or two we cleared away the rubbish from the original entrance passage to the chamber, and so went out into the passages, which turned and wandered up and down. These were so nearly choked with mud, that in many parts the only way along them was by lying flat, and sliding along the mud, pushed by fingers and toes. In this way, sliding, crawling, and wading, I reached as near to the outer mouth of the passage as possible; and then by measuring back to the chamber, the position of the mouth on the outside of the pyramid was pretty nearly found. But so deep was it under the rubbish, and so much encumbered with large blocks of stone, that it took about a fortnight to reach it from the outside.

The pyramid had been elaborately arranged so as to deceive and weary the spoiler, and it had apparently occupied a great amount of labour to force an entrance. The mouth was on the ground level, on the south side,

The cemetery of Hawara was a great resource for discoveries, and it proved to be one of the richest fields that I have found, although it was entirely an unexpected prize. The oldest tombs, of the pyramid time, had all been ruined ages ago, and the pits re-used for the nineteenth dynasty, the Ptolemaic times, and crocodile burial of the Roman age. But some slabs from the stone chapels on the surface had fallen down the tomb shafts, and were thus preserved.

The oldest unravaged tomb was of about the end of the twenty-sixth dynasty; and that was a treasury of amulets, being the funeral vault of the family of a great noble, Horuta. It was half inundated, the water being thigh deep, and though all woodwork and stucco was spoilt, yet the amulets of stone, and some of pottery, were uninjured. The great interment was that of Horuta himself. In a side chamber, branching from the large chamber, a huge sarcophagus of hard and tough limestone had been placed, containing three successive coffins of wood. This was built in solidly with masonry all around it, filling up the whole chamber, so that its very existence was hardly to be suspected by any one in the large chamber. To clear this out in such a position was hard work; a party of good hands were steadily labouring at it, mainly by contract, for two or three months. Down a well, forty feet deep, and in a pitch-black chamber, splashing about in bitter water, and toiling by candle-light, all the work had to be done; and dragging out large blocks of masonry in a very confined space in such circumstances is slow and tedious. While thus mining the way to the expected burial, we lit on a hole in the masonry filled with large ushabtis standing in rows, two hundred in all, of the finest workmanship; and, before long, on the other side of the sarcophagus, two hundred more were found in a similar recess. But the sarcophagus itself was most difficult to open. The lid block was nearly two feet thick, and almost under water. It was far too heavy for us to move entire, so some weeks were spent in cutting it in two. One piece was then raised, but it proved to be the foot end; and though I spent a day struggling with the inner coffins, sitting in the sarcophagus up to my nose in water, I yet could not draw them out from under the rest of the stone lid. So after some days the men raised that, enough to get one's head in between the under side of it and the water; and then I spent another gruesome day, sitting astride of the inner coffin, unable to turn my head under the lid without tasting the bitter brine in which I sat. But though I got out the first coffin lid, the inner one was firmly fastened down to its coffin; and though I tried every way of loosening the coffin, it was so firmly set in a bed of sand that crowbars and mining with the feet were useless, and it was so low in the water as to be out of arms' reach. The need of doing everything by feeling, and the impossibility of seeing what was done under the black water, made it a slow business. A third day I then attacked it, with a helpful friend, Mr. Fraser. We drilled holes in the coffin, as it was uninscribed, and fixed in stout iron bolts. Then, with ropes tied to them, all our party hauled again and again at the coffin; it yielded: and up came an immense black mass to the surface of the water. With great difficulty we drew it out, as it was very heavy, and we had barely room for it beneath the low ceiling. Anxiously opening it, we found a slight inner coffin, and then the body of Horuta himself, wrapped in a network of beads of lazuli, beryl, and silver, the last all decomposed. Tenderly we towed him out to the bottom of the entrance pit, handling him with the same loving care as Izaak his worms. And then came the last, and longed-for scene, for which our months of toil had whetted our appetites,--the unwrapping of Horuta. Bit by bit the layers of pitch and cloth were loosened, and row after row of magnificent amulets were disclosed, just as they were laid on in the distant past. The gold ring on the finger which bore his name and titles, the exquisitely inlaid gold birds, the chased gold figures, the lazuli statuettes delicately wrought, the polished lazuli and beryl and carnelian amulets finely engraved, all the wealth of talismanic armoury, rewarded our eyes with a sight which has never been surpassed to archaeological gaze. No such complete and rich a series of amulets has been seen intact before; and as one by one they were removed all their positions were recorded, and they may now be seen lying in their original order in the Ghizeh Museum. The rest of the family of Horuta lay in the large chamber, some in stone sarcophagi, some only in wooden coffins. They also had their due funereal wealth; and a dozen other sets of amulets rewarded our search, some of them as fine a series as any known before, but not to compare for a moment with those of the walled-in patriarch.

Of rather later age, perhaps Ptolemaic, was a large wooden coffin that we found; the body and the lid were two equal parts, plainly rectangular; and they lay where some old spoiler had left them, separated, and afterwards buried under a heap of stuff thrown out in digging later tombs. The whole surface of this sarcophagus was stuccoed, inside and outside, top and bottom, and every part of it finely painted and inscribed. The top of the lid had the deities of the district, the hawk, the Osiris-crocodile, and the bennu, with inscriptions; the lower part inside bore other animals, the vulture, the cow, and white hippopotamus; the inside of the lid had the two crocodile-headed Sebeks and the ape; and underneath the lower part, or body, was a long inscription, partly biographical. I had a terrifying experience with this coffin; when I found it much of the stucco was loose, and any amount of trouble was worth while to preserve so beautiful and important an object. I observed in copying it that parts had been waxed, to heighten the colour, and this suggested to me to fasten down the stucco by wax. I tried melting it on with a plate of hot iron, but could scarcely do it without blackening it with smoke. In course of this I poured a layer of wax over the surface; but what was my horror to see as the wax cooled that it contracted into saucer-formed patches, lifting up with it the stucco, and leaving bare wood beneath! To touch these wax patches must irrevocably ruin all hopes of replacing the stucco; so I covered it with sheets of paper, and thought on it for some days, a spectre of dismal failure. I tried in vain to buy a brazier at Medinet; so at last, making a grating of wire, I filled it with red-hot charcoal, and supported it over part of the unlucky coffin. As I watched it, the wax softened, flattened, and dropped exactly into place again; patch after patch settled down, the wax melted and ran in under the stucco; and at last I saw the whole surface completely relaid, and fixed so firmly that even the fearful rattle of an Egyptian railway wagon, in the long journey to Bulak, did not injure it.

But perhaps the greatest success at Hawara was in the direction least expected. So soon as I went there I observed a cemetery on the north of the pyramid; on digging in it I soon saw that it was all Roman, the remains of brick tomb-chambers; and I was going to give it up as not worth working, when one day a mummy was found, with a painted portrait on a wooden panel placed over its face. This was a beautifully drawn head of a girl, in soft grey tints, entirely classical in its style and mode, without any Egyptian influence. More men were put on to this region, and in two days another portrait-mummy was found; in two days more a third, and then for nine days not one; an anxious waiting, suddenly rewarded by finding three. Generally three or four were found every week, and I have even rejoiced over five in one day. Altogether sixty were found in clearing this cemetery, some much decayed and worthless, others as fresh as the day they were painted.

Not only were these portraits found thus on the mummies, but also the various stages of decoration that led up to the portrait. First, the old-fashioned stucco cartonnage coverings, purely Egyptian, of the Ptolemies. Next, the same made more solidly, and with distinct individual differences, in fact, modelled masks of the deceased persons. Then arms modelled in one with the bust, the rest of the body being covered with a canvas wrapper painted with mythologic scenes, all purely Egyptian. Probably under Hadrian the first portraits are found, painted on a canvas wrapper, but of Greek work. Soon the canvas was abandoned,

and a wooden panel used instead; and then the regular series of panel portraits extends until the decline in the third century. All this custom of decorating the mummies arose from their being kept above ground for many years in rooms, probably connected with the house. Various signs of this usage can be seen on the mummies, and in the careless way in which they were at last buried, after such elaborate decoration.

Though only a sort of undertaker's business, in a provincial town of Egypt, and belonging to the Roman age, when art had greatly declined, yet these paintings give us a better idea of what ancient painting was, and what a high state it must have reached in its prime, than anything yet known, excepting some of the Pompeian frescoes. Mannerism is evident in nearly all of these, and faults may be easily detected; yet there is a spirit, a sentiment, an expression about the better examples which can only be the relic of a magnificent school, whose traditions and skill were not then quite lost. A few indeed of these heads are of such power and subtlety that they may stand beside the works of any age without being degraded. If such was Greek painting still, centuries after its zenith, by obscure commercial artists, and in a distant town of a foreign land, we may dimly credit what it may have been in its grandeur. The National Gallery now begins its history of paintings far before that of any other collection; the finest examples left, after the selection of the Bulak Museum, being now at Trafalgar Square.

The technical methods of these paintings have been much discussed. Certainly the colours were mixed with melted wax as a medium, and it seems most likely that both the brush and hard point were used. The backing is a very thin cedar panel, on which a coat of lead colour priming was laid, followed by a flesh-coloured ground where the face was to come. The drapery is freely marked in with bold brushfuls of colour, while the flesh is carefully and smoothly laid on with zigzag strokes. In some portraits the boldness of the work is almost like some modern romanticist's; at a foot distance the surface is nearly incomprehensible, at six or eight feet it produces a perfect effect.

Several of these pictures when found were in a perilous state; the film of wax paint was scaled loose from the panel, and they could never be even tilted up on edge without perishing. After finding several in this tender state, and pondering on their preservation, I ventured to try the same process as for the stucco coffin. The wire-grating was filled with red-hot charcoal, and then the frail portrait was slid in beneath it, a few drops of melted wax laid on it, and watched. In a few seconds the fresh wax began to spread, and then at once I ladled melted wax all over the surface; a second too long, and it began to fry and to blister; too sharp a tilt to drain it when it came out, and the new wax washed away the paint. But with care and management it was possible to preserve even the most rotten paintings with fresh wax; and afterwards I extended this waxing to all substances that were perishable, woodwork and leather, as well as stucco and paint.

This custom, however, of preserving the mummies above ground, adorned with the portraits, gave way about the time of Constantine, or perhaps a little earlier, and immediate burial was adopted. Probably this was partly due to the progress of Christianity.

In one instance a far more valuable prize accompanied a body; under the head of a lady lay a papyrus roll, which still preserved a large part of the second book of the Iliad, beautifully written, and with marginal notes. A great quantity of pieces of papyrus, letters and accounts, of Roman age, were also found scattered about in the cemetery. In a large jar buried in the ground lay a bundle of title-deeds: they recorded the sale of some monastic property, and were most carefully rolled, bound up with splints of reed, to prevent their being bent, and wrapped in several old cloths.

In yet another respect Hawara proved a rich field. In the coffins, in the graves, and in the ruins of the chambers, were still preserved the wreaths with which the dead had been adorned, and the flowers which the living had brought to the tombs. These wreaths were often in the most perfect condition, every detail of the flowers being as complete as if dried for a herbarium. They illustrate the accounts of Pliny and other writers about ancient wreaths, and the plants used for them, and show what a careful and precise trade the wreath-maker's was. Beside the decorative plants there were many seeds, and remains of edible fruits and vegetables, which had been left behind in the surface chambers of the tombs after the funereal feasts. Altogether, the cemetery of Hawara has doubled the extent of our list of ancient Egyptian botany, under the careful examination given by Mr. Newberry to the boxes full of plants which I brought away.

Few places, then, have such varied interest as Hawara; the twelfth dynasty pyramid, the labyrinth, the amulets of Horuta, the portraits, the botany, and the papyri, are each of special interest and historical value.

In this year also I visited the other side of the lake of the Fayum, now known as the Birket Kerun. There, at some miles back in that utter solitude, stands a building of unknown age and unknown purport. It is massively constructed, but without any trace of inscription, or even ornament, which would tell its history. That it cannot be as late as the Kasr Kerun, is probable from its being at a much higher level. There would be no object in making a building at some miles distant in the desert, as it now is; and we must rather suppose it to belong to the age when the lake was full, and extended out so far. But where it comes before the Ptolemaic age we cannot say. The front doorway leads into a long court, which has a chamber at each end, and seven recesses in the long

side opposite the entrance. These recesses have had doors, of which the pivot holes can be seen. There are no traces of statues or of sarcophagi about; and the place has been keenly tunnelled and explored by treasure-seekers.

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