The tombs of the princesses also, which lie altogether in a little valley behind Medînet Habu, at the southern end of Memnonia, belong without doubt to the eighteenth and twentieth dynasties, as also the most important of the numerous private tombs, which extend from the other side of Medînet Habu, over mountain and valley to the entrance of the Valley of Kings. The priests of rank, and high officers, were fond of representing in their tombs all their wealth in horses, carriages, herds, boats, and household goods, as well as their hunting-grounds, fish-ponds, gardens, and halls; even the artificer and mechanic, busied in their different employments, are to be found on many of the walls; on which account many of these are of higher interest to us than even the king’s tombs, the representations on which are almost always carried through the whole life to the death. Of later monuments, those of the twenty-sixth dynasty, in the seventh and sixth century before Christ, are the most remarkable. The greater number of these are in the rocky cove between Qurna and the hill Abd el Qurna, hewn out of flat surfaces, and are, for distinction, called el Asasif. The rocky plains here alone offered room for inscriptions, and these have been largely used. Already, from here, may be perceived a multitude of high gates and walls built of black bricks; these enclose, in long squares, sunken courts, the entrances to which are high arched pylon-doors, which, from a distance, look like large Roman triumphal arches. When you enter within the walls, you look directly into the court, dug down into the rock from twelve to fifteen feet deep, which you can descend by a staircase. This uncovered court is now the largest accessible tomb, one hundred feet long and seventy-four broad; it was excavated for a royal writer, named Petamenap. From this you go through an antechamber into a large rock-hall, with two rows of pillars, of an extent of sixty-five feet by fifty-two feet, with rooms and corridors on both sides; then through an arched entrance into a second hall with eight pillars, of about fifty-two feet by thirty-six feet; and then into a third hall with four pillars, thirty-one feet long and broad; and at last into a chamber twenty feet by twelve feet, which ends in a niche. Out of this chamber, at the end of the first row of rooms, a door leads into a very large room, and to the right into another, to a continuation of six corridors, with two stair-cases of nine steps and one of twenty-three steps, into a chamber, in which a pit forty-four feet deep, leads to another small room. This second course of rooms and passages, which run at a right angle to the first, are 172 feet long, but the first, reckoning the outer court with them, is 311 feet. From the fountain-room, another corridor leads to the right into a diagonal room, together measuring fifty-eight feet in this direction. Before the two stair-cases, in the second suite of rooms, there opens a fourth line of