As every part of the tomb had its special decoration, so also it had its special furniture.  Of the chapel furniture few traces have been preserved.  The table of offerings, which was of stone, is generally all that remains.  The objects placed in the serdab, in the passages, and in the sepulchral chamber, have suffered less from the ravages of time and the hand of man.  During the Ancient Empire, the funerary portrait statues were always immured in the serdab.  The sepulchral vault contained, besides the sarcophagus, head-rests of limestone or alabaster; geese carved in stone; sometimes (though rarely) a scribe’s palette; generally some terra-cotta vases of various shapes:  and lastly a store of food-cereals, and the bones of the victims sacrificed on the day of burial.  Under the Theban Dynasties, the household goods of the dead were richer and more numerous.  The Ka statues of his servants and family, which in former times were placed in the serdab with those of the master, were now consigned to the vault, and made on a smaller scale.  On the other hand, many objects which used to be merely depicted on the walls were now represented by models, or by actual specimens.  Thus we find miniature funeral boats, with crew, mummy, mourners, and friends complete; imitation bread-offerings of baked clay, erroneously called “funerary cones,” stamped with the name of the deceased; bunches of grapes in glazed ware; and limestone moulds wherewith the deceased was supposed to make pottery models of oxen, birds, and fish, which should answer the purpose of fish, flesh, and fowl.  Toilet and kitchen utensils, arms, and instruments of music abound.  These are mostly broken—­piously slain, in order that their souls should go hence to wait upon the soul of the dead man in the next world.  Little statuettes in stone, wood, and enamel—­blue, green, and white—­are placed by hundreds, and even by thousands, with these piles of furniture, arms, and provisions.  Properly speaking, they are reduced serdab-statues, destined, like their larger predecessors, to serve as bodies for the Double, and (by a later conception) for the Soul.  They were at first represented clothed like the individual whose name they bore.  As time went on, their importance dwindled, and their duties were limited to merely answering for their master when called by Thoth to the corvee, and acting as his substitutes when he was summoned by the gods to work in the Fields of Aalu.  Thenceforth they were called “Respondents” (Ushabtiu), and were represented with agricultural implements in their hands.  No longer clothed as the man was clothed when living, they were made in the semblance of a mummified corpse, with only the face and hands unbandaged.  The so-called “canopic vases,” with lids fashioned like heads of hawks, cynocephali, jackals, and men, were reserved from the time of the Eleventh Dynasty for the viscera, which were extracted from the body by the embalmers.  As for the mummy, it continued, as time went on, to be more and more enwrapped in cartonnage, and more liberally provided with papyri and amulets; each amulet forming an essential part of its magic armour, and serving to protect its limbs and soul from destruction.