fingers resting on the edge of a copper bowl, usually placed on the palm of the left hand.  The head was pillowed on a single sun-dried brick.  Various articles of ornament and use were interred with each body, which will be more particularly described hereafter.  Food seems often to have been placed in the tombs, and jars or other drinking vessels are universal.  The brick vaults appear to have been family sepulchres; they have often received three or four bodies, and in one case a single vault contained eleven skeletons.

[Illustration:  PLATE 12]

The clay coffins, shaped like a dish-cover, are among the most curious of the sepulchral remains of antiquity. [PLATE XI., Fig. 2; PLATE XII., Fig. 1.] On a platform of sun-dried brick is laid a mat exactly similar to those in common use among the Arabs of the country at the present day; and hereon lies the skeleton disposed as in the brick vaults, and surrounded by utensils and ornaments.  Mat, skeleton, and utensils are then concealed by a huge cover in burnt clay, formed of a single piece, which is commonly seven feet long, two or three feet high, and two feet and a half broad at the bottom.  It is rarely that modern potters produce articles of half the size.  Externally the covers have commonly some slight ornament, such as rims and shallow indentations, as represented in the sketch (No. 1).  Internally they are plain.  Not more than two skeletons have ever been found under a single cover; and in these cases they were the skeletons of a male and a female.  Children were interred separately, under covers about half the size of those for adults.  Tombs of this kind commonly occur at some considerable depth.  None were discovered at Mugheir nearer the surface than seven or eight feet.

The third kind of tomb, common both at Mugheir and at Telel-Lahm, is almost as eccentric as the preceding.  Two large open-mouthed jars (a and b), shaped like the largest of the water-jars at present in use at Baghdad, are taken, and the body is disposed inside them with the usual accompaniments of dishes, vases, and ornaments. [PLATE XII.  Fig. 2.] The jars average from two and a half feet to three feet in depth, and have a diameter of about two feet; so that they would readily contain a full-sized corpse if it was slightly bent at the knees.

Sometimes the two jars are of equal size, and are simply united at their mouths by a layer of bitumen (dd); but more commonly one is slightly larger than the other, and the smaller mouth is inserted into the larger one for a depth of three or four inches, while a coating of bitumen is still applied externally at the juncture.  In each coffin there is an air-hole at one extremity (c) to allow the escape of the gases generated during decomposition.