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The skull-form of the Southerners agrees with that of the Mediterranean races. But we have no nécropoles of the Northerners to tell us much of their peculiarities. We have nothing but their flint arrowheads.
Sakkâra marks the central point of the great Memphite necropolis, as it is the nearest point of the western desert to Memphis. Northwards the necropolis extended to Griza and Abu Roâsh, southwards, to Daslmr; even the nécropoles of Lisht and Mêdûm may be regarded as appanages of Sakkâra. Many later kings, however, especially of the Vith Dynasty, were actually buried at Sakkâra.
The books that tell of it are pyramids, obelisks, necropoles; constructions colossal and enigmatic; the granite epitaphs of finite things. To-day, in the shattered temples, from which all other gods are gone, one divinity still lingers. It is Silence. In Iran sorrow was a folly. In Egypt speech was a sin. Apis could bellow, Anubis bark; man might not even stutter.
One was presented by the Khedive to the city of London in 1877, and the other to the city of New York the same year. The shaft on the latter bears two inscriptions, one celebrating Thothmes III., and the other Rameses II. One of the most characteristic monuments of Egypt is the statue of the Sphinx, so often found in the temples and necropoles.
Sergi and the other ethnologists. It was not this population, the stone-users whose nécropoles have been found by Messrs. de Morgan, Pétrie, and Maclver, that entered the Nile valley by the Wadi Hammamat.
We have an interesting example of the custom of building a secondary tomb for royalties in these two nécropoles of Dra' Abu-'l-Negga and Abydos. Queen Teta-shera, the grandmother of Aahmes, a beautiful statuette of whom may be seen in the British Museum, had a small pyramid at Abydos, eastward of and in a line with the temple and secondary tomb of Aahmes. In 1901 Mr. Mace attempted to find the chamber, but could not. In the next year Mr. Currelly found between it and the Aahmes tomb a small chapel, containing a splendid stele, on which Aahmes commemorates his grandmother, who, he says, was buried at Thebes and had a mer-âhât at Abydos, and he records his determination to build her also a pyramid at Abydos, out of his love and veneration for her memory. It thus appeared that the pyramid to the east was simply a dummy, like Usertsen's mastabas, or the Mentuhetep pyramid at Dêr el-Bahari. Teta-shera was actually buried at Dra' Abu-'l-Negga. Her secondary pyramid, like that of Aahmes himself, was in the "holy ground" at Abydos, though it was not an imitation bâb, but a dummy pyramid of rubble. This well illustrates the whole custom of the royal primary and secondary tombs, which, as we have seen, had obtained in the case of royal personages from the time of the 1st Dynasty, when Aha had two tombs, one at Nakâda and the other at Abydos. It is probable that all the 1st Dynasty tombs at Abydos are secondary, the kings being really buried elsewhere. After their time we know for certain that Tjeser and Snefru had duplicate tombs, possibly also Unas, and certainly Usertsen (Senusret) III, Amenemhat III, and Aahmes; while Mentuhetep III and Queen Teta-shera had dummy pyramids as well as their tombs. Ramses III also had two tombs, both at Thebes. The reasons for this custom were two: first, the desire to elude plunderers, and second, the wish to give the ghost a pied-
But they give us pause, these disappearing ruins, for they are the debris of that ageless temple, where sleeps the head of the god, the debris of the tombs of the Middle and Ancient Empires, and they indicate still the wide extent and development of the necropoles of Abydos, so old that it almost makes one giddy to think of their beginning.
It is chiefly with regard to the sepulchres of the kings that the most momentous discoveries of recent years have been made at Thebes, and at Sakkâra, Abusîr, Dashûr, and Lisht, as at Abydos. For this reason we deal in succession with the finds in the nécropoles of Abydos, Memphis, and Thebes respectively.
Notwithstanding these deficiencies, however, Egypt offers a most attractive field for the archaeologist, and new discoveries are constantly adding to our knowledge of this interesting country. THE MONUMENTS. The monuments of Egypt are religious, as the temples, sepulchral, as the necropoles, or triumphal, as the obelisks.
Nine hundred and ninety-three tombs have been excavated; all, to judge by the objects found with the human remains, belonging to the Bronze age; of these five hundred and twenty-seven contained buried bodies, and four hundred and fifty-three cremated relics. This is a larger proportion than in the primitive necropoles of Italy.
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