ls of neighbouring countries at command. They were poor;
and the slenderness of their resources debarred them from great
undertakings. They for the most part gave up the preparation of magnificent
tombs, and employed such wealth as remained to them in the fabrication of
fine mummy-cases carved in sycamore wood. The beauty of their coffins,
therefore, but affords an additional proof of their weakness and poverty.
When for a few centuries the Saite princes had succeeded in re-establishing
the prosperity of the country, stone sarcophagi came once more into
requisition, and the wooden coffin reverted to somewhat of the simplicity
of the great period. But this Renaissance was not destined to last. The
Macedonian conquest brought back the same revolution in funerary fashions
which followed the fall of the Ramessides, and double and triple mummy
cases, over-painted and over-gilded, were again in demand. If the
craftsmen of Graeco-Roman time who attired the dead of Ekhmim for their
last resting places were less skilful than those of earlier date, their bad
taste was, at all events, not surpassed by the Theban coffin-makers who
lived and worked under the latest princes of the royal line of Rameses.

[Illustration: Fig. 264.--Panel portrait from the Graeco-Roman Cemetery at
Hawara, now in the National Gallery, London. (_Hawara, Biahmu, and
Arsinoe_, W.M.F. Petrie, Plate X., page 10.)]

A series of Graeco-Roman examples from the Fayum exhibit the stages by
which portraiture in the flat there replaced the modelled mask, until
towards the middle of the second century A.D. it became customary to
bandage over the face of the mummy a panel-portrait of the dead, as he was
in life (fig. 264).

The remainder of the funerary outfit supplied the cabinet-maker with as
much work as the coffin-maker. Boxes of various shapes and sizes were
required for the wardrobe of the mummy, for his viscera, and for his
funerary statuettes. He must also have tables for his meals; stools,
chairs, a bed to lie upon, a boat and sledge to convey him to the tomb, and
sometimes even a war-chariot and a carriage in which to take the air.[71]
The boxes for canopic vases, funerary statuettes, and libation-vases, are
divided in several compartments. A couchant jackal is sometimes placed on
the top, and serves for a handle by which to take off the lid. Each box was
provided with its own little sledge, upon which it was drawn in the funeral
procession on the day of bu