nd
many of XIII, 20. Nearly all were, however, broken, for, as in all
these tombs, the arch had fallen in. This tomb contained also a string
of beads, barrel beads of lapis lazuli, carnelian and gold foil, and
small discs of gold.

In No. 265 were found more than two hundred pots scattered in all
directions; a few were nested in a recess halfway down the side of the
tomb. All the shapes XIII, 1-28, except 16 and 22, were found in this
tomb. There was no skeleton. A hole had been pierced in the base of
every pot after baking.

One group of tombs of this period (_v._ PL. XXIV) had apparently been
made at one time. In three of them the skeletons remained with two or
three coarse pots laid before the face. Outside the enclosure wall of
another of these groups of tombs was a heap of saucers (like XIII,
12), painted inside with a rough cross of white paint. These are, by
the fabric, probably of the same period as the tombs.

21. In the great XIIth dynasty cemetery outside the town the graves
were of different construction, consisting of a long and narrow shaft
from which, at both the north and the south ends, opened a chamber.
But two, or perhaps three, tombs of this form were found inside the
walls. This cemetery was well known to the Arabs, and a few years ago
a party of the Qurneh dealers, armed with a bogus Museum permit,
dug there for several weeks. The tombs they had rifled could be
distinguished from tombs that were intact or had been plundered in
early times by the sharper edges of the depressions left. Time has
rounded over the traces of the earlier robberies, so that anciently
robbed tombs look much like those which are intact, but in which the
roof has fallen in causing a dip in the ground not unlike the top of
a tomb-shaft. The cemetery lies in a shoal in the dry stream-bed, at
whose mouth El Kab was placed. This shoal is a great bank of gravel
and a fine clay-like detritus, the beds of which lie alternately, the
thickness of each varying in different parts. The practice in the
XIIth dynasty was to sink the tomb-shaft until a layer of gravel was
reached sufficiently strong for a chamber to be safely cut out of it.
The chambers were about 2 m. square and probably rather less than 1.50
m. high, but they were made flat-roofed, and in most cases the roof
had fallen in, crushing the bones and often also the pottery below.
Even if the roof was complete when we opened the tomb, it would
usually fall before we could e