The great tomb of King Kha-sekhem of the IInd Dynasty, 223 feet by 54 feet, is unique in the fact that its central chamber, 10 feet by 17 feet, and nearly 6 feet deep, is entirely built of stone, and is the earliest known example of a piece of mason-work. Each tomb, when it was completed and occupied, was roofed with wooden beams, and above it the sand was piled in a low mound, the precursor of the great stone burial mounds which were to appear ere long when the pride of the IVth Dynasty monarchs was no longer content with anything less than a pyramid for its memorial. Above the tomb a pair of grave-steles bearing the king’s name were placed, so that the royal cemetery of Abydos must have presented an appearance not unlike that of a modern churchyard with its mounds and its headstones. No royal bodies, of course, were found in these earliest tombs. Time and the tomb-robber had done their work too well for that, and the art of mummification was as yet unknown. At a very early date the tombs had been rifled, and some of them burned, no doubt in the process of disposing of the bodies after they had been plundered, as the Ramesside robber disposed of the mummy of Sebek-em-saf. The most unquestionably personal relic discovered was the shrivelled arm of the queen of King Zer, which had been stolen by some robber who had not time to carry off his plunder, and had thrust it into a hole in the tomb wall, where it was found, with its four beautiful bracelets still intact, by one of Petrie’s workmen. What was left in the tombs is simply what previous robbers had not deemed worth the trouble of carrying away. Yet these pieces of pottery, these broken bits of ivory furniture, these ebony and ivory plaques, with their archaic inscriptions, have proved of inestimable importance; for they have enabled us to fashion in our minds a picture, rude enough, no doubt, and sadly lacking in detail, but unquestionably true in its main outline of the earliest ordered civilisation in the history of the world.