The two queens were small of stature, and their mummies—­which were well-nigh lost in the cases—­had to be packed round with an immense quantity of rags, to prevent them from shifting, and becoming injured.  Apart from their abnormal size, these cases are characterised by the same simplicity which distinguishes other mummy-cases of royal or private persons of the same period.  Towards the middle of the Nineteenth Dynasty, the fashion changed.  The single mummy-case, soberly decorated, was superseded by two, three, and even four cases, fitting the one into the other, and covered with paintings and inscriptions.  Sometimes the outer receptacle is a sarcophagus with convex lid and square ears, upon which the deceased is pictured over and over again upon a white ground, in adoration before the gods of the Osirian cycle.  When, however, it is shaped in human form, it retains somewhat of the old simplicity.  The face is painted; a collar is represented on the chest, a band of hieroglyphs extends down the whole length of the body to the feet, and the rest is in one uniform tone of black, brown, or dark yellow.  The inner cases were extravagantly rich, the hands and faces being red, rose-coloured, or gilded; the jewellery painted, or sometimes imitated by means of small morsels of enamel encrusted in the wood-work; the surfaces frequently covered with many-coloured scenes and legends, and the whole heightened by means of the yellow varnish already mentioned.  The lavish ornamentation of this period is in striking contrast with the sobriety of earlier times; but in order to grasp the reason of this change, one must go to Thebes, and visit the actual sepulchres of the dead.  The kings and private persons of the great conquering dynasties[70] devoted their energies, and all the means at their disposal, to the excavation of catacombs.  The walls of those catacombs were covered with sculptures and paintings.  The sarcophagus was cut in one enormous block of granite or alabaster, and admirably wrought.  It was therefore of little moment if the wooden coffin in which the mummy reposed were very simply decorated.  But the Egyptians of the decadence, and their rulers, had not the wealth of Egypt and the spoils of neighbouring countries at command.  They were poor; and the slenderness of their resources debarred them from great undertakings.  They for the most part gave up the preparation of magnificent tombs, and employed such wealth as remained to them in the fabrication of fine mummy-cases carved in sycamore wood.  The beauty of their coffins, therefore, but affords an additional proof of their weakness and poverty.  When for a few centuries the Saite princes had succeeded in re-establishing the prosperity of the country, stone sarcophagi came once more into requisition, and the wooden coffin reverted to somewhat of the simplicity of the great period.  But this Renaissance was not destined to last.  The Macedonian conquest brought back the same revolution in funerary