volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

340 The Coffins of Al-Barshafi.
a group of the inner coffins of the Xllth dynasty from
Al-Barshah, and I availed myself of it with peculiar
satisfaction, for the coffins came from a part of the
cemetery in the hills which I had insisted on their
clearing out. But the information which reached me
day by day from the south made it necessary for me to
push on to Suhag without delay.
When I reached Suhag two or three natives met me
and said they had been told to bring me out to the White
Monastery without delay. I set out with them, and just
before we came to the site of the ruins of the little Coptic
building, which I have already described (p. 333),
several natives came towards me, clapping their hands
and singing joyfully ; as soon as I saw what they had
to show me I felt that they had good cause for rejoicing.
I went with them and looked at the places which they
had cleared out, and at the eastern end of a kind of deep
niche in the outer wall they showed me a rectangular
hollow in the ground, the bottom of which was still
covered with a very deep layer of bright yellow sand
from the Western Desert. In this hollow four ancient
Egyptian inscribed stelae had been placed on their edges
sideways, and formed, as it were, the sides of a box, and
a larger stele was laid over them and formed a cover,
and all the joints were well plastered with lime. In
clearing out the place one of the diggers struck the
cover with his digging tool, and when he and his friends
had broken the plaster and taken it off they found
lying in the box formed by the stelae a parcel tied round
with leather thongs in a dressed goat's skin. The
thongs were cut (for they could not be untied) and the
skin unwrapped, and then the finders saw a bundle
rolled up in many thick folds of coarse Akhmim linen
cloth. The contents of this carefully packed parcel
were two large books with papyrus leaves, bound in
stout leather-covered boards also made of papyrus.
Both books were in a perfect state of preservation,
and it was clear that they had been packed up together
and hidden with deliberation and great care. The layer
of sand, the stone coffer formed by the Eg3rptian stelae.