Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/447

 APPENDIX. The discovery of some thirty-eight royal mummies with their sepulchral furniture, which signalized the accession of Professor Maspero to the Directorship of 'Egyptian Explorations, was the result, in some degree, of one of those inductive processes of which M. Perrot speaks as characteristic of modern research. For several years previously those who kept account of the additions to public and private collections of Egyptian antiquities had suspected that some inviolate royal tomb had been discovered by the Arabs of Thebes, and that they were gradually dissipating its contents. Early in 1876 General Campbell bought the hieratic ritual of Pinotem I., — or Her Hor, a priest king, and founder of the twenty-first dynasty — from them ; and in 1S77 M, de Saulcy showed M. Maspero photographs of a long papyrus which had belonged to Queen Notemit, the mother of Pinotem. About the same time the funerary statuettes of that king appeared in the market, " some of them very fine in workmanship, others rough and coarse." ^ The certainty of a find and of its nature became- so great that, in 1879, Maspero was enabled to assert of a tablet belonging to Rogers-Bey, that it came from some sepulchre "belonging to the, as yet, undiscovered tomb of the Her Hor family." - The mummy for which this tablet was made has been discovered in the pit at Deir-el-Bahari. The evidence which gradually accumulated in the hands of M. Maspero, all pointed to two brothers Abd-er-Rasoul, as the possessors of the secret. These men had established their homes in some deserted tombs in the western clifi", at the back of the Ramesseum, and had long combined the overt occupation of guiding European travellers and providing them with donkeys, with the covert and more profitable profession of tomb-breakers and mummy-snatchers.3 M. Maspero caused the younger of these brothers, Ahmed Abd-er-Rasoul, to be arrested and taken before the Mudir at Keneh. Here every expedient known to Eg}-ptian justice was ^ Maspero, La trntzaille de Deir-el-Bakari, Cairo, 1SS2. 410. - Ibict. Her paper is illustrated with wocdcuts after some of the more interesting objects found, and a plan of the locale.
 * See Miss A, B. Edwards's account of these gentlemen in Harper's Magazine ior July, 18S2.