from the time of the god!  The walls of thy tomb are strong, thou hast planted trees at the edge of thy pond, thy soul reposes beneath them and drinks the water; follow that which seemeth good to thee as long as thou art on earth, and give bread to him who is without land, that thou mayest be well spoken of for evermore.  Think upon the gods who have lived long ago:  their meat offerings fall in pieces as if they had been torn by a panther, their loaves are defiled with dust, their statues no longer stand upright within the temple of Ra, their followers beg for alms!  Be happy for one day!”

     * Marriages between brothers and sisters in Egypt rendered
     this word “sister” the most natural appellation.

Those gone before thee “have had their hour of joy,” and they have put off sadness “which shortens the moments until the day when hearts are destroyed!—­Be mindful, therefore, of the day when thou shalt be taken to the country where all men are mingled:  none has ever taken thither his goods with him, and no one can ever return from it!” The grave did not, however, mingle all men as impartially as the poet would have us believe.  The poor and insignificant had merely a place in the common pit, which was situated in the centre of the Assassif,* one of the richest funerary quarters of Thebes.

* There is really only one complete description of a cemetery of the poor, namely, that given by A. Rhind.  Mariette caused extensive excavations to be made by Gabet and Vassalli, 1859-1862, in the Assassif, near the spot worked by Rhind, and the objects found are now in the Gizeh Museum, but the accounts of the work are among his unpublished papers, vassalli assures me that he sometimes found the mummies piled one on another to the depth of sixty bodies, and even then he did not reach the lowest of the pile.  The hurried excavations which I made in 1882 and 1884, appeared to confirm these statements of Rhind and Vassalli.

Yawning trenches stood ever open there, ready to receive their prey; the rites were hurriedly performed, and the grave-diggers covered the mummies of the day’s burial with a little sand, out of which we receive them intact, sometimes isolated, sometimes in groups of twos or threes, showing that they had not even been placed in regular layers.  Some are wrapped only in bandages of coarse linen, and have been consigned without further covering to the soil, while others have been bound round with palm-leaves laid side by side, so as to form a sort of primitive basket.  The class above the poorest people were buried in rough-hewn wooden boxes, smaller at the feet than towards the head, and devoid of any inscription or painting.  Many have been placed in any coffin that came to hand, with a total indifference as to suitability of size; others lie in a badly made bier, made up of the fragments of one or more older biers.  None of them possessed any funerary furniture, except the tools of his trade, a thin pair of leather shoes, sandals of cardboard or plaited reeds, rings of terra-cotta or bronze, bracelets or necklets of a single row of blue beads, statuettes of divinities, mystic eyes, scarabs, and, above all, cords tied round the neck, arms, limbs, or waist, to keep off, by their mystic knots, all malign influences.