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Updated: May 12, 2025
Some mummy-cases, too, were there, ready to be packed off to other towns. The most costly were covered with fine red linen, wound about with strings of beads and gold ornaments, and with the name of the dead painted on the upper side.
Apart from their abnormal size, these cases are characterised by the same simplicity which distinguishes other mummy-cases of royal or private persons of the same period. Towards the middle of the Nineteenth Dynasty, the fashion changed.
But he would take no pains to please either the Alexandrians or Egyptians; he despised them both. When asked if he would not like to see the Alexandrian monarchs lying in their mummy-cases in the same tomb, he answered: "No, I came to see the king, not dead men," His contempt for Cleopatra and her father made him forget the great qualities of Ptolemy Soter.
These were usually distinct and separate trades, the embalmers generally returning the bodies to the friends after they had completed the process of embalming. Another set of men then prepared the corpse for burial, while the mummy-cases or sarcophagi were prepared by men of another trade.
The widow and the steward of the wealthy Superior of the temple of Hatasu, and with them a priest of high rank, were in eager discussion with the officials of the embalming-House, and were selecting the most costly of the patterns of mummy-cases which were offered to their inspection, the finest linen, and amulets of malachite, and lapis-lazuli, of blood-stone, carnelian and green felspar, as well as the most elegant alabaster canopi for the deceased; his body was to be enclosed first in a sort of case of papier-mache, and then in a wooden and a stone coffin.
Hardly unwrapped, still dusty from the strenuous labour of deliverance, "the female of the Scolia is seized by the male, who does not even give her time to wash her eyes." Having slept over a year underground, the Sitares, barely rid of their mummy-cases, taste, in the sunlight, a few minutes of love, on the very site of their re-birth; then they die.
The stone room in which he was eating his meal was badly lighted; the daylight came through a small opening in the roof, over which the sun stood perpendicularly, and a shaft of bright rays, in which danced the whirling motes, shot down through the twilight on to the stone pavement. Mummy-cases leaned against all the walls, and on smooth polished slabs lay bodies covered with coarse cloths.
In a long, narrow room apart hung the portraits, waiting to be attached to the upper end of the mummy-cases of those lately deceased, and still in the hands of embalmers. Here, too, most of the lamps were out, and the upper end of the room was already dark. Only in the middle, where the best pictures were on show, the lights had been renewed.
Most mummy-cases are fastened by four little tongues of wood, two on either side, which are fixed in the upper half, and, passing into mortices cut to receive them in the thickness of the lower half, are there held fast by pegs of hard wood. But this mummy case had eight such tongues. Evidently it had been thought well to secure it firmly. "Ali looked at it with open eyes and no wonder.
The mummy-cases had been opened by the Arabs, who had taken out the mummies and in some instances replaced the wrong ones. Many mummies of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties had been removed to this cave probably for safety, on account of its secrecy. Out of the twenty-nine mummies found here, seven were of kings, nine of queens and princesses, and several more of persons of distinction.
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