and a very considerable number of them were found there between 1884 and 1887. The faces are gilded, the head-dress is painted darkblue or green, and the lower part of the body of the coffin, below the elaborate pectoral and figure of Nut and figure of the mummy with its Canopic jars, is covered with figures of the gods and short extracts from late funerary works like the Lamentations of Isis. In Lower Egypt, at this time, huge coffins, more than 8 feet in length and 4 feet in breadth, were made of green and black basalt, and the large, broad human faces on them have flat ears and noses and thick blubbery lips. They were in demand in Palestine, for Tabnith, king of Sidon about B.C. 380, was buried in one, and the body of the cover bears on it a long inscription cut in large hieroglyphs and containing a prayer for meat and drink and apparel and liberty of motion in the Other World. The Phoenician inscription giving the name of Tabnith is cut on the front of the foot of the coffin. His son Eshmûnâzâr was buried in a coffin of similar size and shape, but it has no hieroglyphic text upon it, and the front of the body of the coffin is covered with an inscription in Phoenician characters. The use of stone coffins was more common in Lower than in Upper Egypt, and this was because they did not perish from the action of moist earth as rapidly as wooden ones. In the Ptolemaïc Period the coffin was usually rectangular in form, and was made of thin planks of wood, which were decorated with figures of the gods of the dead who were favourites at that period, painted in bright colours. In the Roman Period the coffin was often dispensed with altogether. The body, more or less well bandaged, was laid upon a large flat rectangular board, which varied in size from 8 feet by 2 feet 6 inches to 6 feet by 1 foot 8 inches, and had a slot in it at each corner. A large rectangular wooden canopy, with angle-posts and a vaulted roof, was lifted over it, and when the ends of the angleposts had been driven into the slots in the base-board, pegs were driven through the ends that projected through the slots, and canopy and board became fastened together. On the outside of the canopy were painted figures of the gods, and a favourite decoration of the inside was figures of the Twelve Signs of the Zodiac. This idea was derived from earlier coffins of the Egyptians (e.g., B.M. 6678), on which we have figures of the gods of the constellations, the five planets, the Signs of the Zodiac, and the thirty-six (or, thirty-nine) Dekans. Sometimes we have a gilded figure of the Ba, or soul of the deceased, in the form of a hawk perched upon the ridge in the centre of the canopy. The base-board is lined with a large sheet of brown linen, on which a large figure of the goddess of Amenti, or Nut, or Hathor is painted in the form of an Egypto-Greek woman with masses of jet-black hair. On coffins of this class the name of the deceased is written sometimes in hieroglyphs and Greek letters and sometimes in demotic and Greek letters. The great oases in the Western Desert probably passed under the rule of Egypt in the time of the Middle Kingdom, and there is little doubt that the Egyptian governors who ruled Khârgah were buried there with the same pomp and ceremony as they would have been in Egypt. Few funerary remains older than the time of Darius have been found in that oasis, but since the railway was taken thither by a great sugar company many things have been brought from it to Egypt. Among these is the finely painted coffin B.M. 52949. The variations in the scenes painted on the coffin suggest that it was made and decorated locally, and the hieroglyphic inscription down the back shows by the numerous mistakes in it that the artist was copying a religious formula which he could neither copy correctly nor understand. The coffin may be dated in the IIIrd or IVth century A.D. Whilst the natives were digging down the limestone hills between Akhmîm and Sûhâk to burn and turn into lime suitable for mortar they found a considerable number of tombs. Each tomb contained generally one or two chambers, and in each chamber there were several mummies (all of the Roman Period), as often without as with coffins. The coffins were long rectangular boxes made of thin planks of wood, and the covers were formed by a single thin plank. They were painted a yellowish-white colour inside and out, and the names, which were carelessly scrawled at one end of the cover, were in cursive Greek letters. But these coffins were of great interest, because on one end of each of the large ones there was a life-size portrait plaster head of the deceased, and on the other a pair of plaster feet; sometimes a pair of plaster hands lay on the middle of the coffin. Sometimes the plaster head rested on the mummy, and the flat projection from the neck served as a sort of pectoral. The faces on all these heads were undoubtedly intended to be portraits, and a collection of fine specimens of them is exhibited in the British Museum (24780, 24781, etc.). All these burials seemed to me to date from the IIIrd century A.D. The coffins that some have attributed to the Vth and VIth centuries I have never seen. THE HETEP, OR TABLET FOR SEPULCHRAL THE graves of the pre-dynastic Egyptians prove that the inhabitants of the Nile Valley were accustomed to make offerings of food and drink to their dead, and it is probable that their forefathers had done the same for scores of generations. Many of the modern peoples of the Sûdân, and not only those who inhabit that portion of it which is called Egyptian, also spread out offerings of fruit, grain, meat and beer, which they are convinced are of service to their dead kinsfolk. As long as the Egyptians buried their dead in shallow oval hollows in the sand, or in cavities lined with sun-dried bricks, the sepulchral offerings were laid in the graves with the bodies. But when they began to mummify their dead, and to build sepulchres in stone over them, they adopted the custom of placing their funerary gifts at first upon reed mats and then upon slabs of stone which they laid on the ground as nearly as possible over the place where the mummy lay. In the maṣṭabah tombs the tablet for offerings was laid on the ground at the foot of the "false door," or of the inscribed stele that at a later period took its place in the so-called Tuat Chamber. The stone slab served as a table for the Ka of the deceased when it left its chamber to partake of the offerings provided for it, and the soul, as it alighted on the stele, or passed through the "false door" on its way to or from the mummy chamber, would be gratified by the sight of the gifts made to its former associate in the flesh. In primitive times the offerings were, as is the case to-day in many parts of Central Africa, laid upon leaves; later the reed mat took the place of the leaves, and at a still later period the stone slab superseded the mat. The tomb of a king was supplied with offerings of meat, milk, wine, beer, fruit, vegetables, unguents, etc., daily, and the priests whose duty it was to recite the liturgy of Funerary Offerings would take care that everything which the royal Ka needed was supplied. Nobles and priestly officials had to be satisfied with offerings made to their tombs on festival days only; but what was to happen to the Ka of the man whose kinsfolk were too poor to make any offerings in his tomb or at his grave? This Rectangular stone vessel to receive libations made to Khart-en-Khennutu. difficulty was appreciated at a very early period, and the priests devised a way out of it. Figures of the things offered-bread-cakes, geese, haunches of beef, fruits, etc.-were cut in outline or sculptured in relief on the tablet for offerings, and an inscription was cut upon the face or its edges, in which Anubis or Osiris was called upon to provide the Ka of the deceased with per kheru, Ţ, or pert kheru, i.e., "things that things that appear at the word." The deceased, himself an immaterial entity, uttered the necessary word of power, and offerings as immaterial as himself appeared from out of the sculptures on the tablet as soon as he had done so, and, so to |