Egypt_, p. 141.

The Pharaohs often peopled their royal cities with prisoners of war,
captured on the field of battle, or picked up in an expedition through
an enemy's country. Snofrui peopled his city with men from the Libyan
tribes living on the borders of the Western desert or Monitu captives.*

* Petrie thinks that the people who were interred in a
contracted position belonged to the aboriginal race of the
valley, reduced to a condition of servitude by a race who
had come from Asia, and who had established the kingdom of
Egypt. The latter were represented by the mummies disposed
at full length (_Medum_, p. 21).

The body having been placed in the grave, the relatives who had taken
part in the mourning heaped together in a neighbouring hole the funerary
furniture, flint implements, copper needles, miniature pots and pans
made of rough and badly burned clay, bread, dates, and eatables in
dishes wrapped up in linen. The nobles ranged their mastabas in a single
line to the north of the pyramid; these form fine-looking masses of
considerable size, but they are for the most part unfinished and empty.
Snofrui having disappeared from the scene, Kheops who succeeded him
forsook the place, and his courtiers, abandoning their unfinished tombs,
went off to construct for themselves others around that of the new king.
We rarely find at Medum finished and occupied sepulchres except that of
individuals who had died before or shortly after Snofrui. The mummy of
Eanofir, found in one of them, shows how far the Egyptians had carried
the art of embalming at this period. His body, though much shrunken,
is well preserved: it had been clothed in some fine stuff, then covered
over with a layer of resin, which a clever sculptor had modelled in such
a manner as to present an image resembling the deceased; it was then
rolled in three or four folds of thin and almost transparent gauze.

Of these tombs the most important belonged to the Prince Nofirmait
and his wife Atiti: it is decorated with bas-reliefs of a peculiar
composition; the figures have been cut in outline in the limestone, and
the hollows thus made are filled in with a mosaic of tinted pastes which
show the moulding and colour of the parts. Everywhere else the ordinary
methods of sculpture have been employed, the bas-reliefs being enhanced
by brilliant colouring in a simple and delicate manner.

[Illustration: 173.jpg NOFKIT, LADY OF MEDUM]