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Cemeteries.

The cemetery sites on the desert have always been more or less plundered anciently. A prehistoric site may have no external trace, as the blown sand may cover it so evenly that there is no suspicion of anything lying beneath. But on a gravel surface there are generally some indications left of the hollows of the graves, and scraps of broken pottery left about by the plunderers (Fig.9). The historic cemeteries are generally easier to see, as they are in rising ground, and the holes of the tomb pits show on the surface. The difficulty is not to find the site of a cemetery, but to find a grave in it which still contains anything. As a rule, any tomb pit which appears still undisturbed has been left either because it belongs to an unfinished tomb with nothing in it, or because the tomb has already been reached from elsewhere. At Medum an untouched walling up of a chamber had been left, because the plunderers had tunnelled under the mass of the tomb and broken through the floor of the chamber. At Dendereh the floor of the chamber was entire, with the lid of the sarcophagus sunk in it, yet untouched; it had been left so because the plunderers had mined through from the outside under the floor to the sarcophagus, and broken through the side of it without touching the chamber. Some untouched tombs were left because the burials in them were known to be so poor that they were not worth opening. All this points to the plundering being mostly done during the lifetime of those who saw the burial. Usually only one tomb in ten contains anything noticeable; and it is only one in a hundred that repays the digging of the other ninety-nine.