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“It was a hot forty-eight hours’ work, under the burning sun of Egypt, to bring all those objects to the surface, and a toilsome labour, enlisting the services of three hundred Arabs, to convey them to Luxor, and subsequently to pile them on the deck of the Museum steamer which had journeyed up the river to receive them. The passage down the river partook of the character of a funeral ovation: women with dishevelled hair ran along the banks uttering shrieks and funereal chants, others threw dust upon their heads, men discharged guns, and the funeral of a defunct monarch of to-day could not have excited more apparent emotion.”

The coffins and mummies included the following:—

Raskenen, king of Upper Egypt, a descendant of the old Theban royal race, but at this time tributary to the Hyksos or Shepherd kings. According to the Sallier papyrus in the British Museum, he quarrelled with the Hyksos monarch Apopi, in reference to the cession of an important well. This brought about the overthrow and expulsion of the Hyksos, who had ruled the country for five centuries. According to the same authority, Joseph arrived in Egypt during the reign of the Pharaoh Nub (B.C. 1730), and rose to honour under Apopi.