* Petrie thinks that the people who were interred in a contracted position belonged to the aboriginal race of the valley, reduced to a condition of servitude by a race who had come from Asia, and who had established the kingdom of Egypt.  The latter were represented by the mummies disposed at full length (Medum, p. 21).

The body having been placed in the grave, the relatives who had taken part in the mourning heaped together in a neighbouring hole the funerary furniture, flint implements, copper needles, miniature pots and pans made of rough and badly burned clay, bread, dates, and eatables in dishes wrapped up in linen.  The nobles ranged their mastabas in a single line to the north of the pyramid; these form fine-looking masses of considerable size, but they are for the most part unfinished and empty.  Snofrui having disappeared from the scene, Kheops who succeeded him forsook the place, and his courtiers, abandoning their unfinished tombs, went off to construct for themselves others around that of the new king.  We rarely find at Medum finished and occupied sepulchres except that of individuals who had died before or shortly after Snofrui.  The mummy of Eanofir, found in one of them, shows how far the Egyptians had carried the art of embalming at this period.  His body, though much shrunken, is well preserved:  it had been clothed in some fine stuff, then covered over with a layer of resin, which a clever sculptor had modelled in such a manner as to present an image resembling the deceased; it was then rolled in three or four folds of thin and almost transparent gauze.

Of these tombs the most important belonged to the Prince Nofirmait and his wife Atiti:  it is decorated with bas-reliefs of a peculiar composition; the figures have been cut in outline in the limestone, and the hollows thus made are filled in with a mosaic of tinted pastes which show the moulding and colour of the parts.  Everywhere else the ordinary methods of sculpture have been employed, the bas-reliefs being enhanced by brilliant colouring in a simple and delicate manner.

[Illustration:  173.jpg NOFKIT, LADY OF MEDUM]

     Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph taken by Einil Brugsch-
     Bey.

The figures of men and animals are portrayed with a vivacity of manner which is astonishing; and the other objects, even the hieroglyphs, are rendered with an accuracy which does not neglect the smallest detail.  The statues of Eahotpu and of the lady Nofrit, discovered in a half-ruined mastaba, have fortunately reached us without having suffered the least damage, almost without losing anything of their original freshness; they are to be seen in the Gizeh Museum just as they were when they left the hands of the workman.  Eahotpu was the son of a king, perhaps of Snofrui:  but in spite of his high origin, I find something humble and retiring in his physiognomy.  Nofrit, on the contrary, has an imposing appearance: