Clay jars and dishes, arranged around the body, contained the food and drink required for the dead man’s daily fare—­his favourite wine, dates, fish, fowl, game, occasionally also a boar’s head—­and even stone representations of provisions, which, like those of Egypt, were lasting substitutes for the reality.  The dead man required weapons also to enable him to protect his food-store, and his lance, javelins and baton of office were placed alongside him, together with a cylinder bearing his name, which he had employed as his seal in his lifetime.  Beside the body of a woman or young girl was arranged an abundance of spare ornaments, flowers, scent-bottles, combs, cosmetic pencils, and cakes of the black paste with which they were accustomed to paint the eyebrows and the edges of the eyelids.

Cremation seems in many cases to have been preferred to burial in a tomb.  The funeral pile was constructed at some distance from the town, on a specially reserved area in the middle of the marshes.  The body, wrapped up in coarse matting, was placed upon a heap of reeds and rushes saturated with bitumen:  a brick wall, coated with moist clay, was built around this to circumscribe the action of the flames, and, the customary prayers having been recited, the pile was set on fire, masses of fresh material, together with the funerary furniture and usual viaticum, being added to the pyre.  When the work of cremation was considered to be complete, the fire was extinguished, and an examination made of the residue.  It frequently happened that only the most accessible and most easily destroyed parts of the body had been attacked by the flames, and that there remained a black and disfigured mass which the fire had not consumed.  The previously prepared coating of mud was then made to furnish a clay covering for the body, so as to conceal the sickening spectacle from the view of the relatives and spectators.  Sometimes, however, the furnace accomplished its work satisfactorily, and there was nothing to be seen at the end but greasy ashes and scraps of calcined bones.  The remains were frequently left where they were, and the funeral pile became their tomb.  They were, however, often collected and disposed of in a manner which varied with their more or less complete combustion.  Bodies insufficiently burnt were interred in graves, or in public chapels; while the ashes of those fully cremated, together with the scraps of bones and the debris of the offerings, were placed in long urns.  The heat had contorted the weapons and half melted the vessels of copper; and the deceased was thus obliged to be content with the fragments only of the things provided for him.  These were, however, sufficient for the purpose, and his possessions, once put to the test of the flames, now accompanied him whither he went:  water alone was lacking, but provision was made for this by the construction on the spot of cisterns to collect it.  For this purpose several cylinders of pottery, some twenty