26. The temple to the east of the central eastern gate of the town was excavated, and a XIIth dynasty tomb was found beneath it. The walls had been carried away, but the floor of the temple was nearly complete, and from the scratches made upon it by the masons the plan was recovered. This will be published by Mr. Clarke. No foundation deposits were discovered, and the only scrap of inscription was a part of the cartouche of Nectanebo.
27. No certain solution can be given of the question of the date of the great wall. Reasons for thinking it to be the work of Usertesen II have been already given, but several attempts were made to test this hypothesis. The base of the wall was cleared at several points to search for any accumulation of rubbish left by the builders, and all the gateways were examined for foundation deposits. In the east gate, at a height of 3 feet above the stone pavement, there was a layer of potsherds, painted with a rough decoration of comma-shaped dashes, and with them were some fragments of an ostracon written in late demotic. This would show that the gateway was already partly ruined and blocked in Roman (?) times. And between the row of mastabas to the north and the great wall were found the foot of an ushabti, perhaps of the XXVIth dynasty, and a pot ([Pl. XX], 13), probably Roman. The first was on the ground level, the second 5 feet above it. But the position of these objects only shows that the sand-heap had not reached its present level when they were dropped, and I observed nothing quite inconsistent with the early date suggested. It should be added, however, that the stonework of the gates and the arch in the north wall seem, to Mr. Somers Clarke’s experienced eye, to show some features of a much later style. These he will describe in his own work on El Kab.
28. A group of late bronzes were found at one point in the south of the great enclosure. They were 800 in number, each mounted on a little wooden base. One ([Pl. V], 3) was a fine piece, representing Nekheb adored by a kneeling figure. The rest were Osiris figures, except one, which represented Imhetep. About a hundred were 5 inches high, or upwards, of fair workmanship, made in thin bronze cast on a core. They were all piled together in a space 1·1 m. by ·6 m., not near to any tomb.
29. Near the south-east corner of the town ([Pl. XXIV]) was a peculiar brick building, consisting of four rows of brick pillars, six in each row, enclosed in a surrounding wall. The pillars were about 2 m. square, the passages between them only about ·80 m. wide. The actual height of the brickwork was 1·50 m. or less, but the building may have been a high one, for the base of a brick staircase remained between two of the pillars. Throughout the building were great numbers of pots, chiefly broken, of a long bottle-shape with a wide mouth, and pierced at the bottom, with a hole an inch wide ([XX], 14); these pots exactly fitted certain holes left at regular intervals in the brickwork. Pots nearly of this shape, but shorter, are still used in Egypt, being built into the walls of pigeon-towers to serve as nesting-places for the birds. So far as the pottery guides us, the building might then be of Arab times, but the large size of the bricks (34 cm. × 17·5 × 11), part of a stone window found on the south side, and the smooth surface of the site before we began to dig, make it unlikely that the structure is recent.
CHAPTER V.
DESCRIPTION OF PLATES.
30. [Pl. I]—Nos. 1, 2 and 3 are the plan, elevation, and longitudinal section of one (264) of the sunk arch tombs believed to belong to the early XIIth dynasty.
No. 4 gives the plan of the chamber in the IVth dynasty tomb of Ka-mena; 5 and 6 are rough notes of the stone walls on the east and south sides of the same chamber.
No. 7 gives the plan of the important tomb in which an inscribed cylinder was found in association with Neolithic pots (No. 166, § 13).