DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.55201#0069
56
EXCAVATIONS AT DEIR EL BAHR!
witching him. Soiled rags, broken pots, left-over salts, the wooden
“signs of life,” and the pedet-'aha were packed in sixty-seven large
jars which were sealed and carried up to the little chamber by the
tomb. Curiously enough we can say“that it took four trips to get them
all up there, for only eighteen rope sling-nets were provided to carry
the pots, and they had to be taken off and carried back after each
trip, until the fourth and last lot was placed in the chamber with the
ropes still on them. Finally came the table and the blocks, and as the
former was too wide to be crammed through the narrow entrance, the
embalmers broke it up and stuck it in on top of the jars as a mere pile
of boards.
While we are on the subject of embalming materials it is worth
while noting that in an Eighteenth Dynasty chamber of the same
sort we found pots marked in ink with their contents—“wain-wood
sawdust,” “miri-material,” and “natron salt”—or with the names of
the embalmers Hori and Montu. In one of these jars was the rather
gruesome scraper with which they had worked on the bodies.
Centuries before this, sorcerers were told of who could make a
magic crocodile of wax that would gobble up the lover of a faithless
wife, or later of a magic wax ship and its crew that could kidnap a
king and carry him to Ethiopia and back in a single night. What could
be more natural, then, than to make a magic wax mummy which,
if only the proper words had been recited over it, could substitute
itself for a body that had been destroyed. Such a wax mummy lying
in a miniature wooden coffin was made for one Si-I rah, son of Ren-
iker, who lived in the days of the Eleventh Dynasty. The Egypt
Exploration Fund had found his empty pit tomb in the southern
court of the temple, and in 1921-22 we found his little magic wax
mummy in its coffin where some robber had dropped it as a thing of
no value. The archaeologist will see in the wax mummy, like those of
Neferu found in 1923-24, a prototype of the countless wooden, stone,
and pottery shawabtis which fill every Egyptian collection. Only by
a curious twist of ideas what in the Eleventh Dynasty was a man’s own
portrait in the course of time became his servant.
In ancient Egyptian mythology the god Horus had set the bones of
his father Osiris together and had preserved them from decay, and
the planks of coffins were joined together with wooden pegs just as
the bones of Osiris were joined together by the magic of Horus.
Therefore, the coffin-maker of the early Eighteenth Dynasty wrote
upon his pegs and his tenons before he drove them into the planks:
“Joined for thee are thy bones which are in the Great Cemetery, by
EXCAVATIONS AT DEIR EL BAHR!
witching him. Soiled rags, broken pots, left-over salts, the wooden
“signs of life,” and the pedet-'aha were packed in sixty-seven large
jars which were sealed and carried up to the little chamber by the
tomb. Curiously enough we can say“that it took four trips to get them
all up there, for only eighteen rope sling-nets were provided to carry
the pots, and they had to be taken off and carried back after each
trip, until the fourth and last lot was placed in the chamber with the
ropes still on them. Finally came the table and the blocks, and as the
former was too wide to be crammed through the narrow entrance, the
embalmers broke it up and stuck it in on top of the jars as a mere pile
of boards.
While we are on the subject of embalming materials it is worth
while noting that in an Eighteenth Dynasty chamber of the same
sort we found pots marked in ink with their contents—“wain-wood
sawdust,” “miri-material,” and “natron salt”—or with the names of
the embalmers Hori and Montu. In one of these jars was the rather
gruesome scraper with which they had worked on the bodies.
Centuries before this, sorcerers were told of who could make a
magic crocodile of wax that would gobble up the lover of a faithless
wife, or later of a magic wax ship and its crew that could kidnap a
king and carry him to Ethiopia and back in a single night. What could
be more natural, then, than to make a magic wax mummy which,
if only the proper words had been recited over it, could substitute
itself for a body that had been destroyed. Such a wax mummy lying
in a miniature wooden coffin was made for one Si-I rah, son of Ren-
iker, who lived in the days of the Eleventh Dynasty. The Egypt
Exploration Fund had found his empty pit tomb in the southern
court of the temple, and in 1921-22 we found his little magic wax
mummy in its coffin where some robber had dropped it as a thing of
no value. The archaeologist will see in the wax mummy, like those of
Neferu found in 1923-24, a prototype of the countless wooden, stone,
and pottery shawabtis which fill every Egyptian collection. Only by
a curious twist of ideas what in the Eleventh Dynasty was a man’s own
portrait in the course of time became his servant.
In ancient Egyptian mythology the god Horus had set the bones of
his father Osiris together and had preserved them from decay, and
the planks of coffins were joined together with wooden pegs just as
the bones of Osiris were joined together by the magic of Horus.
Therefore, the coffin-maker of the early Eighteenth Dynasty wrote
upon his pegs and his tenons before he drove them into the planks:
“Joined for thee are thy bones which are in the Great Cemetery, by