Personally Conducted: A Cricket Story

THE EARLIEST TOMBS. About thirteen “stairway” tombs and thirty-seven mastabas were examined. The precise number cannot be given, for when the walls of the mastaba are entirely denuded, and only the well is left, one cannot be sure that the grave was ever of the mastaba form. Of smaller graves which yielded any evidence, there were about fifty-three; but many more, which, from their position, orientation, and size, could be assigned to the early period, were quite empty, or contained only a few potsherds. 5. The most important mastaba was that of Ka-mena (Pl. XXIII). It is one of a group which we found under the great mound of drifted sand on the north side of the wall. Pl. VII gives two views of this group of tombs during the process of excavation. The low walls are denuded near the end of the sand-slope to a single brick’s height; in the centre they are a metre high, and they sink again towards the end under the great wall. They are built with recessed panels, and were originally plastered and painted white. Round the whole tomb runs a boundary wall. The two small closed chambers at the end of the last passage (corresponding to those which, in the tomb of Nefer-shem-em, contained his two statues) were empty, but a few fragments of the legs of a small sandstone statue were found near. In the E. wall itself there are two niches; in and near them were found many small pieces of worked limestone, some inscribed. They are copied in Pl. XVIII, 49-53 and 55. The face in 49 retained a touch of green paint on the cheek, an important piece of evidence for the dating of the Naqada tombs, the occupants of which also used this method of adorning themselves. The pieces, 53 and 54, seem to be parts of a stela; 50 and 55 are from the bases of limestone statues. The inscriptions give us Ka-mena’s name, and show him as a king’s acquaintance and a priest. The chambers inside the mastaba, left blank in the plan, were found filled with brick earth; this was cleared out, but nothing save a scrap of IVth dynasty pottery was found. The earth was doubtless thrown in in this way to economise bricks; the cross walls would serve only to keep this loose earth from falling down the well in the centre.