CHRISTIAN ANTIQUITIES that an inscription may have been painted on this plaster, butthere were no traces of it remaining. A few of the excavations which I assumed to have been made for tombs contained two rooms, one large and one small, either opening directly one into the other, or joined by a very short passage. If these were tombs the dead must have been buried in a hole in the rock, beyond the second chamber. In another excavation, close to the end wall, were the remains of what appeared to be the base of a statue ; not a trace, however, of any inscription was to be seen. On the whole, it is tolerably certain that some of these excavations were actually tombs, which were made for the Egyptian officials who were stationed in the neighbourhood between the Xlth and the XXth Dynasties. It is impossible to think that such an energetic king as Seti I., B.C. 1370, would have allowed the fertile and wealthy provinces of Dongola and Merawi to have remained independent.

The only other ruins in the neighbourhood were those of a Christian monastery and church, which have already been described by Lepsius ; these lie off the track some distance, and are near Gebel al-Ghazal, or " Gazelle Mountain," so called because of the number of gazelles which passed there on their way to drink at the river. Herr Erbkam made a plan of the church, which Lepsius published, and if it was correct the ruins must have been in a much better state of preservation than they are at the present time. As this church will be referred to elsewhere in this book, we may pass on at once to the consideration of the antiquities on the eastern bank.

Almost opposite the pyramid field of Tankasi, on the east bank, is the pyramid field of Kurru. It was visited by Lepsius, who saw there the remains of twenty-one small pyramids and two large ones ; the largest of the latter was thirty-five feet high, and was called by the " strange name of Qantur," probably a corruption of some ancient Nubian name. It was quite easy to trace in 1897 the sites of a very considerable number of pyramids, but scarcely a stone could be seen. On the river side of this necropolis once stood the largest pyramid of the group, which must have been well built and was probably of stone throughout.

"Letters," p. 219.

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