the other signs in this line indicate these places as being Biu, a district of Memphis; Pa She (or “the dwelling of the lake"), the capital of the Fayum; and the Canal of Mer, or Bahr Yusef.  So far this tablet contains picture signs, but the fourth line gives a continued series of hieroglyphics, and is the oldest line of such characters yet discovered.  Mr. F. LI.  Griffiths translates these characters as “who takes the throne of Horus.”

In the north-west corner of the tomb, a stairway of bricks was roughly inserted in later times in order to give access to the shrine of Osiris.  That this is not an original feature is manifest:  the walls are burnt red by the burning of the tomb, while the stairs are built of black mud brick with fresh mud mortar smeared over the reddened wall.  It is notable that the burning of these tombs took place before their re-use in the eighteenth dynasty; as is also seen by the re-built doorway of the tomb of Den, which is of large black bricks over smaller red burnt bricks.  It is therefore quite beside the mark to attribute this burning to the Kopts.

The tomb of King Zer has an important secondary history as the site of the shrine of Osiris, established in the eighteenth dynasty (for none of the pottery offered there is earlier than that of Amenhothes III.), and visited with offerings from that time until the twenty-sixth dynasty, when additional sculptures were placed here.

[Illustration:  368.jpg TOMB OF ZER, 4700 B.C.]

Afterwards it was despoiled by the Kopts in erasing the worship of Osiris.  It is the early state of the place as the tomb of King Zer that we have to study here, and not its later history.

The tomb chamber has been built of wood; and the brick cells around it were built subsequently against the wooden chamber, as their rough, unplastered ends show; moreover, the cast of the grain of the wood can be seen on the mud mortar adhering to the bricks.  There are also long, shallow grooves in the floor, a wide one near the west wall, three narrow ones parallel to that, and a short cross groove, all probably the places of beams which supported the wooden chamber.  Besides these there was till recently a great mass of carbonised wood along the north side of the floor.  This was probably part of the flooring of the tomb, which, beneath the woodwork, was covered with a layer of bricks, which lay on clean sand.  But all the middle of the tomb had been cleared to the native marl for building the Osiris shrine, of which some fragments of sculpture in hard limestone are now all that remain.

A strange feature here is that of the red recesses, such as were also found in the tomb of Zet.  The large ones are on the west wall, and in the second cell on the north wall.  No meaning can yet be assigned to these, except as spirit-entrances to the cells of offerings, like the false doors in tombs of the Old Kingdom.