The rubbish mounds of Abydos are, by their height, and the extent of ground they cover, infallible witnesses to the importance of the old primæval city. From among these mounds two grand structures of the days of Sethos and Rameses have been disinterred. One is a palace, the joint work of father and son. That the genius of Egypt was, as might have been expected at this culminating era of its glory, advancing, and full of invention, is seen in the ceilings of the halls of this palace: they are vaulted. These vaulted roofs, however, are not arches of construction, but formed by placing the enormous slabs of sandstone, of which the roof is made, not with their broad, but with their narrow, faces on the plane of the ceiling. This gave a roof of vast thickness, from which the vault of the roof was excavated. The colouring of these roofs, as of all the decorations of these two grand buildings at Abydos, is remarkably good and well preserved. The other building, which was dedicated to Osiris, who was supposed to have been buried here, was once his most sacred and frequented temple. It was much enlarged and embellished by the great Rameses. The inner walls of the sanctuary were encrusted with alabaster, which still remains. I saw nowhere else Egyptian work in purer taste, nor sculptures so well preserved, both in form and colour. One might have supposed that some of them had been chiselled and coloured last week. I observed a figure of the great king so absolutely untouched by time, that the colour of every bead in his necklace, or collar, is quite fresh. It was here that was found the celebrated tablet of Abydos, which Rameses put up in the temple of Osiris, inscribed with the names of all the kings who had preceded him. This and its fellow tablet, placed at Karnak by Tuthmosis III., about two hundred years before the time of Rameses, are invaluable, as they show that the records preserved by the priests in writing, of which we have transcripts in the dynasties of the priest Manetho, and in the Turin papyrus, are in accord with the monuments. The monumental evidence, it may be observed, is of two kinds. Speaking generally, it is absolutely contemporary—the record having been sculptured in the lifetime of the man, the memory of whose actions, possessions, and thoughts it preserved. There are, however, in these two tablets of Karnak and Abydos, most precious exceptions to the contemporaneousness of the monumental history. How strong and clear was the historical sentiment in the mind of these old Egyptians! We not only find each generation endeavouring to perpetuate a knowledge of its own day, but, in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries before the Christian era, we find Egyptian kings endeavouring to transmit to posterity the names, and the order of their predecessors. This tablet of Abydos is one of the glories of our National Museum.