Apart from the question of duration, reigns which were glorious would give us larger and more beautiful tombs than those which were obscure and marked by weakness in the sovereign. The three great Theban dynasties included several of those monarchs who have been called the Louis the Fourteenths and the Napoleons of Egypt,[262] and it was but natural that they should employ the crowd of artificers and artists which their enterprises gathered about them, for the excavation and decoration of their own tombs. Either for this reason or for some other, there is an extraordinary difference between king and king in the matter of their tombs. Even when we admit that a certain number of royal sepulchres have so far escaped discovery, it is difficult to find place for all the sovereigns of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties in the two _Valleys of the Kings_. Many things lead us to believe that several of those princes were content with very simple tombs; some of them may have been merely buried in the sand. Thus Mariette discovered, at _Drah-Abou'l-Neggah_, the mummy of Queen Aah-hotep, of the nineteenth dynasty, some few feet beneath the surface. The mummy chamber consisted of a few ill-adjusted stone slabs. Like other mummies found on the same place, it seemed never to have been disturbed since it had been placed beneath the soil. It was gilt all over, and was decorated with jewels which now form some of the most priceless treasures of the Boulak Museum. [262] A. RHONÉ, _l'Égypt à petites journées_, p. 104. The private tombs in the Theban necropolis, which are much more numerous than those of kings, do not, like the latter, belong to a single period in the national history. The most ancient among them date back to the eleventh dynasty. There are some also of the Sait period, and a few contemporary with the Ptolemies and the Roman emperors. But by far the greater number belong to that epoch which saw Thebes promoted to be the capital of the whole country, to the centuries, namely, between Amosis, the conqueror of the Hyksos, and the last of the Ramessides. [Illustration: FIG. 186.--Plan and section of a royal tomb. (_Description de l'Égypte_, vol. ii., pl. 79.)]