THE EGYPTIAN SUDAN led into a much larger chamber, with a concave roof, which was almost filled with dead bodies piled one upon the other. By the opening were several skulls, which were thrown there in ancient times. With the exception of a few small earthenware pots nothing was found with the bodies in this chamber.

In clearing the surface round the pyramid, signs of another shaft, which was immediately beneath the chapel of the pyramid, were noticed. The remains of the chapel walls were removed, and we at once came upon the mouth of the shaft, which was filled to a depth of nearly twenty feet with a pinkish-coloured sand. In clearing this out, we found that the shaft turned westwards, in fact that it went right in under the steps already described, and led to a chamber, which was built on the same plan as those mentioned above, and contained dead bodies. In the course of all this work we found nothing which helped us to identify the personage for whom the original pyramid was built, and as the small pylon and the chapel walls were only ornamented with figures of the deceased and his gods in outline, and contained no inscriptions, these portions of the tomb gave no clue. The tomb, in the first instance, was certainly made for a man of importance, and it was probably kept open after he was buried in it, and used as a sepulchre for members of his family for a few generations. The oldest sepulchral chamber of the group is, of course, that which is reached by the shaft over which the chapel stood. At a later period, when the pyramid to which the chapel originally belonged had either fallen or been pulled down, the sandstone above the deeper tomb chamber was excavated, and other chambers made above it to receive the dead. When the newer chambers had received the bodies for which they were intended, the trench containing the steps was filled up, and a new pyramid was built above it. All the lower layers of the casing of the newer pyramid were made of burnt brick.

To the north and west of the pyramid referred to above we opened the shafts of three or four others, but the arrangement of the chambers was the same in each case, and in none of them did we find anything but reddish-yellow earthenware vases, mostly broken. We dug a few trial pits on the slope of the hill in the soft sandstone, and generally ended by breaking through the roof of 346