Wilkinson, John Gardner: Topographie of Thebes, and general view of Egypt: being a short account of the principal objects worthy of notice in the valley of the Nile, to the second cataracte and Wadi Samneh, with the Fyoom, Oases and eastern desert, from Sooez to Bertenice (London, 1835)

Chap. III.] TOMBS RESOLD. 141

draws off their contents into a larger vase below.
Siphons again occur in the tomb of Remeses III.,
in the valley of the kings, so that these two in-
stances prove their invention at all events as early
as the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties. They
are first mentioned by the elder Hero, of Alexan-
dria, who flourished under Ptolemy Euergetes II.

Number 5 bears the name of Remeses VII., but
the stucco on which this and the present subjects
are drawn has been placed over sculptures of an
earlier period ; the tomb, which was frequently the
case, having been sold to another person by the
priests, who, when a family became extinct, and
no one remained to pay the expenses of the litur-
gies, and other claims constantly kept up by their
artifices, indemnified themselves by the appro-
priation of the tomb, and resold it to another
occupant. This was also sometimes the case with
the sarcophagi, and even their wooden coffins,
where the name of its earlier inmate is obliterated
and that of its new possessor substituted in its
stead. In most of the reoccupied tombs the sculp-
ture was suffered to remain unaltered, with the
exception of those parts that immediately referred
to its original tenant; and where a fresh name
has never been introduced it would appear that
the second sale had either not yet taken place, or
that it had been purchased by one whose family
was unlikely to continue the regular payment for
the offices performed to their deceased relative.