Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/369

 The Tomb under the New Empire. 279 operation had been performed. Some words of Diodorus are significant in this direction. " The priests say that their registers attest the existence of forty-seven royal tombs, but that at the time of Ptolemy the son of Lagus, only seventeen remained." This assertion cannot be accepted literally, because twenty-one tombs have already been discovered in the Bab-el-Molouk, some of them in a state of semi-completion, besides four in the ravine which is called the Valley of the West, which makes twenty-five in all. What the priests meant when they spoke to Diodorus was no doubt, that at the time of the Ptolemies, no more than seventeen of their entrances had been discovered. If through the plans made for their construction and preserved in the national archives there were some who knew their situation, they preserved the secret. We know, by the inscriptions upon their walls, that fifteen of the tombs which are now accessible, were open in the time of the Ptolemies ; several of them seem to have been shown, to the Roman and other travellers who visited Egypt, as national objects of interest.^ The precautions taken to hide and obstruct the openings of the royal tombs were thus successful in many cases. Some of these have only been discovered in our own times, through the ardour and patience w4iich characterize modern research, and we have still good reason to suppose that there are others which yet remain to be found. In 1872 Professor Ebers discovered a beautiful private tomb, that of Anemenheb, which, although situated close to one of the most frequented paths in the necropolis, had been previously unknown. It was open, but the opening had been carefully concealed with rough pieces of rock and general rubbish by the fellahs, who used the tomb as a hiding- place from the recruiting officers of the viceroy. They would remain concealed in it for weeks at. a time until the officers had left their village. The royal cemetery of the Ramessides has possibly much more to tell us before its secrets are exhausted. The entrance to the tomb always ran a certain chance of being discovered and freed from its obstacles. It was difficult, of course, to prevent the survival of some tradition as to the ^ Diodorus, i. 46. - "Above the Memnonium," says Strabo (xvii. 46), "there are royal tombs cut in the living rock to the number of forty ; their workmanship is excellent and well worthy of attention."