Several of the smaller mastabas have lately been disposed of to the various museums, as they are liable to damage if they remain where they stand; moreover, they are not of great value to the Museum of Cairo, but are of considerable value to various museums which do not already possess complete specimens of this class of tombs.  A fine one, belonging to the chief Uerarina, is now exhibited in the Assyrian Basement of the British Museum; another is in the Museum of Leyden; a third at Berlin, and so on.  Most of these are simple tombs of one chamber.  In the centre of the rear wall we always see the stele or gravestone proper, built into the fabric of the tomb.  Before this stood the low table of offerings with a bowl for oblations, and on either side a tall incense-altar.  From the altar the divine smoke (senetr) arose when the hen-ka, or priest of the ghost (literally, “Ghost’s Servant"), performed his duty of venerating the spirits of the deceased, while the Kher-heb, or cantor, enveloped in the mystic folds of the leopard-skin and with bronze incense-burner in hand, sang the holy litanies and spells which should propitiate the ghost and enable him to win his way to ultimate perfection in the next world.

The stele is always in the form of a door with pyloni-form cornice.  On either side is a figure of the deceased, and at the sides are carved prayers to Anubis, and at a later date to Osiris, who are implored to give the funerary meats and “everything good and pure on which the god there (as the dead man in the tomb has been constituted) lives;” often we find that the biography and list of honorary titles and dignities of the deceased have been added.

Sakkara was used as a place of burial in the latest as well as in the earliest time.  The Egyptians of the XXVIth Dynasty, wearied of the long decadence and devastating wars which had followed the glorious epoch of the conquering Pharaohs of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties, turned for a new and refreshing inspiration to the works of the most ancient kings, when Egypt was a simple self-contained country, holding no intercourse with outside lands, bearing no outside burdens for the sake of pomp and glory, and knowing nothing of the decay and decadence which follows in the train of earthly power and grandeur.  They deliberately turned their backs on the worn-out and discredited imperial trappings of the Thothmes and Ramses, and they took the supposed primitive simplicity of the Snefrus, the Khufus, and the Ne-user-Ras for a model and ensampler to their lives.  It was an age of conscious and intended archaism, and in pursuit of the archaistic ideal the Mem-phites of the Saite age had themselves buried in the ancient necropolis of Sakkara, side by side with their ancestors of the time of the Vth and VIth Dynasties.  Several of these tombs have lately been discovered and opened, and fitted with modern improvements.  One or two of them, of the Persian period, have wells (leading