not, however, mingle all men as impartially as the poet would have us
believe. The poor and insignificant had merely a place in the common
pit, which was situated in the centre of the Assassîf,* one of the
richest funerary quarters of Thebes.

* There is really only one complete description of a
cemetery of the poor, namely, that given by A. Rhind.
Mariette caused extensive excavations to be made by Gabet
and Vassalli, 1859-1862, in the Assassif, near the spot
worked by Rhind, and the objects found are now in the Gîzeh
Museum, but the accounts of the work are among his
unpublished papers, vassalli assures me that he sometimes
found the mummies piled one on another to the depth of sixty
bodies, and even then he did not reach the lowest of the
pile. The hurried excavations which I made in 1882 and 1884,
appeared to confirm these statements of Rhind and Vassalli.

Yawning trenches stood ever open there, ready to receive their prey;
the rites were hurriedly performed, and the grave-diggers covered the
mummies of the day's burial with a little sand, out of which we receive
them intact, sometimes isolated, sometimes in groups of twos or threes,
showing that they had not even been placed in regular layers. Some
are wrapped only in bandages of coarse linen, and have been consigned
without further covering to the soil, while others have been bound round
with palm-leaves laid side by side, so as to form a sort of primitive
basket. The class above the poorest people were buried in rough-hewn
wooden boxes, smaller at the feet than towards the head, and devoid of
any inscription or painting. Many have been placed in any coffin that
came to hand, with a total indifference as to suitability of size;
others lie in a badly made bier, made up of the fragments of one or more