volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

332 Destruction of Mummies by the Natives.
clearance of the easier part of the site, and we found a
good many small Greek papyri, many of them dated,
and I sent them home to the British MuBfeum.
Telling my friends to continue the clearing I left
the cemetery, and, still keeping to the east bank of the
river, I went with a couple of natives to several small
sites in the hills just opposite Derut. When I had seen
most of the objects which had been found in the district
I arranged with the local dealers to make a few experimental
excavations in the neighbourhood. From one
tomb alone we obtained enough antiquities to justify
the cost of clearing out all we opened. Crossing over
to Derut, I went on to Suhig, and spent three days in
examining several burials of the Roman Period in tombs
that had been hewn during the New Empire in the hills
which lay to the west of the Red Monastery and the
White Monastery. We succeeded in entering several
of these tombs, and I saw many heaps of mummies
and several varieties of funerary furniture and equipment
for mummies which were new to me. 1 rnade a list of the
things—coffins, wooden figures, shrouds, etc.— ^which
I wanted for the British Museum, and left it with my
friends, who undertook to clear a passage to the tombs
and to bring the objects I had selected to Cairo when
opportunity permitted. I wanted to have two or three
specimens of the mummies to add to our collection, but
the local natives would not agree to this. They were
quite willing for me to have the outer wrappings, on
which were painted inscriptions and figures of the gods,
but they insisted on keeping the mummies, so that they
might unroll them at leisure. When I pressed them to
tell me why they would not sell me the mummies, they
said that they often found large gold and silver rings
on the fingers of the mummies of men, and gold necklaces
on the mummies of women. The bodies of several of
these late mummies were filled, not with spices or bitumen,
but with fine white plaster made of lime. As they
needed lime for their fields, they used to break up both
plaster and mummies, and use it as a sort of top dressing.
It seemed a very horrible thing to do, but as it was the