94. Objects from Maket Tomb. 1: 10.
objects, and some foreign; and above all we had the whole find completely recorded, and the positions of things noted exactly as they had been left by the interrers. A curious point is that though the pottery, and the decoration of one of the coffins, precludes our dating this earlier than the end of the nineteenth dynasty, yet all the scarabs on the bodies are of the early part of the eighteenth dynasty, down to Tahutmes III; excepting a few of the twelfth dynasty, doubtless found, as we found so many, in this town. That all the decorations should be heirlooms is a strange fact. In the richest coffin, the only one containing a name, that of the lady Maket, were two musical reeds, carefully slipped inside a larger reed for protection; the scale shown by their holes is the major scale. The pottery here was remarkable; not only are there none of the styles characteristic of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, so well known at Tel el Amarna and Gurob, but the greater part is Phoenician, and not Egyptian, in its paste and its forms; while among it is an Aegean vase, with an ivy leaf and stalk on each side, the earliest style of natural decoration after the period of geometrical. Some vases of green paste here are curious, one in the form of a horn stopped at the wide end.
Of later date still was a large wooden door, which had been probably brought from some other place in Roman times, and used here for a house. It had been made by Usarkon I; and when the bronze head and foot-bands were incised with his name, the wood beneath had received the impression, which it retained after all the bronze had been removed. On the middle of the door there had been a scene of Usarkon offering to Neit and Horus, but this had been almost all chiselled away anciently. This door is now in the Gizeh Museum.
The next period of importance at Illahun is from the twenty-second to the twenty-fifth dynasties. The hills near the pyramid had been much used for rock tombs and mastabas of the pyramid period; but these had been plundered and destroyed in early times, and the excavations were re-used during the later Bubastite and Ethiopian dynasties. These interments are generally rude, the coffins seldom having any intelligible inscription; but mostly sham copies of the usual formula, put on by a decorator who could not read. The only fine tomb I found here was that of a priestess, Amenardus; her sarcophagus has carved inscriptions along the edges and down the corner-posts, and the coffin and that of her father are finely painted: these are now at Gizeh. Many of the mummies have bead net-works and patterns upon them, with figures of winged scarabs, the four genii, the ba bird, and other emblems, all executed in coloured beads. As the threading is completely rotted, the beads all fall apart with the slightest shake, and such work is therefore never preserved when excavations are left to the native overseers. When we entered a tomb, I opened the coffins in the gentlest way, drawing or cutting out the pegs which fastened them; and then a glance inside showed if any bead-work existed. If there were bead patterns, the next step was to fetch a petroleum stove down into the chamber, melt a batch of beeswax, and then when it was on the point of chilling, ladle it out, and dash it over the bead-work. If the wax is too hot it sinks in, and soaks all the mummy wrappings into a solid mass; if poured on, it runs off the body in a narrow stream. When all the beads were covered, and the wax set, I then lifted up the sheet of wax with the bead-work sticking to it, flattened it out on a board, and it was ready for fixing in a tray permanently, with the lower side turned outward.
The amulets found in these tombs are all of the figures of deities, specially Bast, and are of pottery covered with light olivey-green glazes, quite different from those of the nineteenth or twentieth dynasties. A revival of glazed work took place under the twenty-second dynasty, of very delicate character, and fine glazing. But the amulet system went into a very different stage in the twenty-sixth dynasty; then in place of two or three, generally varying in size, we find dozens all uniform in style, either of pottery or of polished stone, arranged in rows on the mummy according to a system. Such was the plan of the amulets at Hawara and at Nebesheh.
Yet a later period had left its remains at Illahun. In Coptic times, about the sixth and seventh century A.D., the ground all about the temple, and on a hill near the canal, was used for a cemetery. Though I could not spend time on clearing such remains myself, the people of the place readily grubbed up their forefathers, and disposed of their garments to any one who would buy them. I thus obtained a large quantity of embroideries and woven stuffs, the best of which are now at South Kensington.
Illahun has then proved of great value to our knowledge of Egyptian civilization; it has shown us a completely arranged town of the middle kingdom; it has surrounded us with all the products and manufactures of that age; it reveals the simultaneous use of finely wrought flint tools with those of copper, when bronze was yet unknown; it provides us with the writings of the period, including a will two thousand years older than any known before; the pyramid proves to be of a design new to us, and contains one of the finest examples of mechanical skill; while of later ages we learn the date of Phoenician pottery, and of the earliest figured Greek vases, and can trace the history of the use of amulets. Of the blanks in the history of civilization, one more has been filled up.
