The disclosure of the tombs of the true early dynastic period, as distinguished from the earlier tombs which we have been describing, was to come from the Holy City of ancient Egypt--Abydos. The reason for the fact that the royal tombs of this period are to be found in the neighbourhood of a town which was never the capital of the land, and not at such important cities as Memphis or Thebes, is, of course, that Abydos had a sanctity to which no other place in Egypt could lay claim, as the burial-place of the head of the God of the Resurrection, Osiris, after his slaughter and dismemberment by Set. Osiris was not the original god of the dead at Abydos, for there existed, long before his supremacy, the worship of a local god Khenti--“The First of the Westerners,” whose place Osiris usurped, or rather with whom he was identified. But from a very early date Osiris was supreme at Abydos. Every devout Egyptian desired to be buried, if possible, at Abydos, and as close as might be to the burial-place of the God of the Resurrection; if actual burial was impossible, as in the vast majority of cases, the next best thing was to be allowed to set up a memorial slab in the neighbourhood, or to make a pilgrimage, even after death, to the Holy City, before being laid in the less holy ground elsewhere; while if none of these expedients was feasible, at least one could send a little votive vase of common pottery, and have it laid near to the sacred site. Accordingly the Necropolis at Abydos is full of memorials of all periods of Egyptian history, and in particular the ground is so crowded with broken pottery of all ages and types that the Arabs call the place “Umm el-Ga’ab,” “The Mother of Pots.” It was on this site that M. Amélineau began his excavations in 1895, continuing them till the spring of 1898. He discovered several large chamber tombs, which contained many articles of exquisite workmanship, vases, and plaques in fine stone and in pottery, ebony and ivory tablets, bearing inscriptions in archaic hieroglyphics, and evidence that the tombs had belonged to kings of Egypt earlier in date than the period of the Pyramid-builders. In particular he found the tomb of a king whose name he read as Khent, and whom he identified with Osiris himself, as one of the titles of the god is “Khent-Amenti.” In January, 1898, he found in this tomb part of a skull which he conjectured to be the skull of the god, and on the same day his workmen unearthed a granite bier of familiar Egyptian shape to which he gave the name of “The Bed of Osiris.”