THE EGYPTIAN SUDAN seems to me open to doubt. Lepsius, in his Letters frovi Egj'pt, Ethiopia, &c. (p. 197), says that he tried to prove to Osman Bey " that the discovery of Ferlini was pure chance, that he had not " found the gold rings in the sepulchral chambers with the " mummies, where they alone might reasonably have been " searched for with any hope of success, but walled up in the " stone, in which place they had been concealed by a whim of the "owner;" but unfortunately, further than this he gives no opinion about the place in the pyramid where they were found. In the upper portion of no other pyramid in the Sudan, up to the present, has any chamber been found, and it is impossible to believe that any one who wished to hide valuable jewellery securely would choose such an unsafe place. According to Ferlini's own showing it was only necessary to remove a few layers of stone, which four men were able to do in a verj short time, before the entrance to the *' chamber " was found, and the treasure secured. I cannot believe that any queen of Meroe would have her jewellery hidden away in a place which would be known to many people, and whence it could be easily abstracted by a very few men in a very short space of time.

It is, moreover, not quite clear what Ferlini saw in the chamber when it was first opened. He says there was a "grande masso," which was presumably some large object, covered over with a cloth that fell to pieces as soon as it was touched. Under the cloth there appeared a rectangular wooden bier (un cataletto, o bara di legno di forma quadrilatera), supported on four carved legs, and under it was the metal vase or bowl, which contained all the gold objects. In the French translation " masso " is rendered by " corps," which, however, does not make the meaning any clearer, unless we accept the translator's explanation that the " masso " or " corps " was a kind of table or altar (une espcce de table ou autel), either a niensa sacra or an ara domestica. Ferlini, however, says distinctly that the object which was under the cloth that crumbled into dust was a bier, or funeral bed (cataletto o bara), and that it had a wooden frame with bars, and if this were so, the object must have resembled the broad wooden dtwdn, or couch, on which the natives sit and sleep at the present day, and was probably intended to receive a dead body.

296 i