dynasty, and people came there to render homage to the memory of Snofrui or his wife Mirisonkhu.  Visitors recorded in ink on the walls their enthusiastic, but stereotyped impressions:  they compared the “Castle of Snofrui” with the firmament, “when the sun arises in it; the heaven rains incense there and pours out perfumes on the roof.”  Ramses II., who had little respect for the works of his predecessors, demolished a part of the pyramid in order to procure cheaply the materials necessary for the buildings which he restored to Heracleopolis.  His workmen threw down the waste stone and mortar beneath the place where they were working, without troubling themselves as to what might be beneath; the court became choked up, the sand borne by the wind gradually invaded the chambers, the chapel disappeared, and remained buried for more than three thousand years.

The officers of Snofrui, his servants, and the people of his city wished, according to custom, to rest beside him, and thus to form a court for him in the other world as they had done in this.  The menials were buried in roughly made trenches, frequently in the ground merely, without coffins or sarcophagi.  The body was not laid out its whole length on its back in the attitude of repose:  it more frequently rested on its left side, the head to the north, the face to the east, the legs bent, the right arm brought up against the breast, the left following the outline of the chest and legs.*

* W. Fl.  Petrie, Medum, pp. 21, 22.  Many of these mummies were mutilated, some lacking a leg, others an arm or a hand; these were probably workmen who had fallen victims to an accident during the building of the pyramid.  In the majority of cases the detached limb had been carefully placed with the body, doubtless in order that the double might find it in the other world, and complete himself when he pleased for the exigencies of his new existence.

The people who were interred in a posture so different from that with which we are familiar in the case of ordinary mummies, belonged to a foreign race, who had retained in the treatment of their dead the customs of their native country.

[Illustration:  171.jpg THE COURT AND THE TWO STELAE OF THE CHAPEL ADJOINING THE PYRAMID OF MEDUM]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a sketch by Fl.  Petrie, Ten
     Years’ Digging in Egypt, p. 141.

The Pharaohs often peopled their royal cities with prisoners of war, captured on the field of battle, or picked up in an expedition through an enemy’s country.  Snofrui peopled his city with men from the Libyan tribes living on the borders of the Western desert or Monitu captives.*