Murray, Margaret Alice: The Osireion at Abydos (London, 1904)

THE OSIREION.

the sloping passage. Here our hopes rose high, for
the entrance to the passage had an enormous roofing
stone still in position ; but we soon found that it
was the only one that remained, the rest of the roof
having suffered the same fate as the other parts of
the building. I was able to copy only a very small
portion of the inscriptions ; for though we cleared
the passage to the floor, two days of high winds silted
it up to the level of the roof. The whole of the
excavation was greatly retarded by heavy falls of
sand, the Roman filling being so loose that there
were continual rivulets of sand running down the
sides; and a high wind would bring down half a ton
of sand and stones in one fall. To sit in a deep pit
under an irregular but continuous fire of small stones,
with the chance of a big stone coming down too, is
an experience more amusing to look back upon than
to endure.

At the north end of the north passage we started
another excavation, for it was there, beyond the
temenos wall, that the big marl heaps stood. It
was partly by these heaps that Professor Petrie had
deduced the fact that a large building lay below the
surface of the desert. They were not natural heaps,
and yet they were of clean marl unmixed with any
remains left by man. They were too far from the
temples of Sety and Rameses to have been the
rubbish removed from their foundations; they were
too large to be from the excavations of an ordinary
tomb ; and as the ancient Egyptian, like his modern
descendants, never took unnecessary trouble, it
follows that the tip-heap would be as near to
the excavation as was allowable. Just inside the
temenos wall, at a depth of about thirty feet, we
came upon a vaulted passage of mud bricks which
extended thirty-five feet northward, and was then
apparently broken, for it was filled with sand. The
thirty-five feet brought us to the north face out-
side the temenos wall, where we sank a large pit
with this curious result:—

The rock-like gebel, at a distance of about sixty
feet from the wall, was cut in a slope like a stair-
case from the surface of the desert, sloping down
towards the wall. Two mud-brick retaining walls
had been built across it to hold back the sand.

At a distance of fifteen feet from the temenos
wall we found a square shaft (of which the wall
formed one side), lined with mud bricks, some of
which bore the cartouche of Sety I. The vaulted
passage, which we had entered from the other side,
ended in a small arch in the temenos wall, and its

floor was paved with blocks of stone. We reached
a depth of over thirty feet, and came to undisturbed
basal sand on which the walls rested. In the vaulted
passage, the pavement was lifted, but with the same
result—undisturbed basal sand. This was during
the last days of the excavations, and there was no
time to make further research. As to the meaning
of this extraordinary shaft I can offer no explanation,
nor can I even hazard a guess. The great marl
heaps lead to the belief that there is still a large
underground building at that end, though our efforts
failed to find it.

2. This hypogeum appears to Professor Petrie to
be the place Strabo mentions, usually called Strabo's
Well. He describes it as being under the Memno-
nium ; with low vaulted arches formed of a single
stone, by which he probably meant that the stone
beams went across the halls and chambers in a
single span. Whether the entrance is really inside
the Temple of Sety, thereby leading him to believe
that it was under that building, or whether it was
entered from the back door of the temple was not
ascertained. As to the spring which he mentions,
it might well be that already the lower parts of
the hypogeum were then below high Nile level, and
that what Strabo saw was the remains of the inun-
dation, which he mistook for a natural spring.

3. At first sight there was nothing to indicate the
real nature of this building, but later, two hypo-
theses presented themselves. The cartouche of
Merenptah appeared in every place where it could be
inserted, and we therefore had to consider the
possibility of its being his tomb. The two points
in favour of this hypothesis are that the walls are
inscribed with scenes and chapters from the Books
of Am Duat and of the Dead, and that Merenptah
is called the Osiris and " Maat-kheru." Now
M. Maspero has pointed out very clearly that the
epithet Maat-kheru can be applied to the living
equally well as to the dead; one of his most con-
vincing instances being taken from the Temple of
Sety at Abydos, where the youthful Rameses II,
destined to live to a very great age, is called Maat-
kheru. I have endeavoured to prove (chap, v.) that
the king, in his lifetime as well as in death, was
identified with Osiris; this being so, the fact of his
being called Osiris does not of itself show that this
was his funeral monument. We must remember
also that Merenptah had a very fine tomb in the

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