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attract them to his own. Probably the best way to put a stop to this would be to adopt some such system as that which is being employed with great success by the English government in Burma to suppress dacoits, six of whom used to be enough to "hold up" a village. Instead of a village being compensated by the government for being raided, the rest of the village has not only to make good the damage done to the victims, but to pay all the expenses connected with the capture of the robbers—a system which, I am told, is producing quite a high degree of public spirit among the villagers.

But to return to Behnesa: Its only claim to distinction is its modern cemetery, the largest one in the district, and a place of peculiar sanctity owing to the number of holy men buried there, including a local saint of much repute, Dakrûri, whose white-domed tomb is a conspicuous object in the broad desert plain extending from Behnesa towards the hills. The cemetery is immediately to the west of the village, and outside it, stretching far to the north and south, a series of low, irregular mounds with intervening hollows and low ground strewn with bricks and pottery, partly covered with a coating of wind-blown sand, marks the site of Oxyrhynchus, the mounds farthest from the village being the most ancient.

My first impressions on walking over the site were not very favorable. The size of the town, which is over a mile in length, made the prospect of discovering papyri appear at first sight almost as far off as that of finding the proverbial needle; and, still more, the condition of utter ruin to which a thousand years' use as a quarry for stone and bricks had reduced the site, made it contrast unfavorably with the Fayûm towns which we had excavated the year before, where many of the houses and buildings still had their walls standing. But at Oxyrhynchus it was clear from the first that little beyond the foundations of buildings was left, and that, if papyri were to be found, they would be not in houses, but in the rubbish mounds. The distinction is one of much importance in digging for papyri, because those found in rubbish mounds, having been thrown away as waste paper, are generally in an extremely fragmentary condition, while in houses, on the other hand, which, after being deserted, have become filled up with sand, one may find collections of complete rolls, sometimes buried in pots, sometimes lying loose on the floor, just as they had been left when the house was deserted by its last occupant.

Though the great majority of papyri have been recovered from town ruins, Greek papyrus rolls are occasionally, though very rarely, found buried in tombs; and those which have been discovered in this way have, as a rule, proved the most valuable of all; for a manuscript would not be buried with its owner unless it were some special literary treasure, whether classical or theological. We therefore devoted our attention first to exploring the ancient cemetery.

The Egyptians generally buried their dead in ridges of high ground near the edge of the desert, though often, for