volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

336 The Mastahah Tombs at Sakkdrah and Gtzah.
found out in the early " seventies " that the mastabahs
at these places were well known to the natives of the
district, and that they had dug down through the filledup
shafts to the sarcophagus chambers. There they
had smashed the covers of several of the heavy stone
sarcophagi, and broken up the bodies which they found
in them, and carried off jewellery, amulets, alabaster
head rests and vases, tables for offerings, etc. Mariette
took the more expert of these men into his service, and
two or three years before his death, with their help,
he explored most of the large mastabahs of Gizah and
Sakkarah, and began to remove to the Bulak Museum
all the finest of the Ka figures from the sarddbs, and
the largest and best of the coloured funerary stelae and
'.' false doors " that were in them. But the illness which
finally proved fatal was gaining strength rapidly whilst
this work was going on, and he died before it was completed.
Unfortunately he took no steps to preserve
the chambers of the mastabahs that were above ground,
and he left many tombs only partly excavated. Whether
this was due to his failing health or to want of funds
cannot be said. He spent every piastre he could get
in excavations and in the publication of texts, and the
sum of money which he could devote to the payment of
watchmen was very small.
In 1890, when the Service of Antiquities began to
clear and tidy up the cemeteries of Gizah and Memphis,
the antica hunters in the neighbourhood turned their
attention to the mastabahs which Mariette had partly
explored, and they discovered to their great delight that
the large chambers above ground of some of the finest
and best of them were in a state of collapse. Mariette
had been obliged to remove the sand which covered them,
but which had at the same time held the walls in position
and preserved them, and when this was done, the
walls began to bulge and buckle, and the roofs dropped in,
and the massive stelae and the false doors and their
heavy architraves fell and completed the ruin. The
natives promptly took advantage of the situation.
They carried off all the uninscribed blocks of stone