THE EGYPTIAN SUDAN transport to Europe, and I was asked to find out if it could be sawn up by the natives, and removed piecemeal, as was the case with the Sargon colossi in the British Museum. When I returned to Mosul the following year I again went to the site of Sargon's palace, where I found a heap of fragments of limestone in the place where the colossus had stood. Inquiries elicited the information that the last remaining colossus had been smashed in pieces by two men from a neighbouring village, and that its destruction had only recently been effected. It seemed that one night one of the two men had a dream, in which a divine messenger appeared to him and told him to go at once and smash in pieces the " idol." When he awoke he rose up, called his son, and, each taking a hammer, they set out, and in a very few hours the colossus was in fragments. When I reported the matter to the Wall of Mosul, he was most sympathetic so far as I personally was concerned, but he refused to punish the two men, or to make any inquiry into the matter, and he remarked that the colossi, which he called khaiwumU, or " animals," when burned made the very finest lime for plastering houses ! At Barkal, as at Mosul, religion and practical utility went hand in hand, and by wrecking a pyramid chapel the natives freed themselves from spirits and obtained stones for building purposes at the same time.

I asked Shekh Muhammad why, since his people were so much afraid of the spirits of his " dead fathers," as he called the old Nubian kings, the villagers dared to carry off the stones from the P3'ramids.' He admitted that they had formerly done so, but added that nothing had been removed in recent years, for the Dervishes told them that the pyramids were the tombs of the Mahdi's ancestors, and that there was laid up in them great treasure, which was guarded by legions of ever-watchful spirits. The latter part of this statement was believed implicitly, for most ' Throughout the Sudan the common word for pyramids is tarddi/, in the singular it is assumed to be tarbul but I have never heard it used by the natives. It is probably a word of Sudani origin, and its exact meaning seems to be unknown ; it may have some connection with the root tardbi iX\dS\ '.

and, if so, the pyramids are c.illed tarCtbil because they aie built of hewn stones.

228