[Illustration: hieroglyph] ‘Mayor in the Southern City (i.e. Thebes) Teta-ky, justified’. This is the earliest known reference to the office of a Mayor of Thebes. CHAPTER IV EXCAVATIONS IN THE VALLEY OF DÊR EL BAHARI BY HOWARD CARTER The panoramic view given in Pl. XIII clearly shows the nineteen different sites that were excavated and examined in this particular part of the necropolis during 1909 and 1910. Many were experimental excavations made on the chance of there being hidden tombs, but as several sites gave no results it is unnecessary to describe them. _Site 3._ A tier of tombs, plundered, and most of them used in later times, probably by Copts, as dwellings. In the corner of the court of the principal tomb of this series, under a fallen stone divisional wall (original), was a number of long and well-made pottery cones, uninscribed; the position and state in which they were found, the wall having fallen and covered them at an early period, gives us reason to suppose that they belong to the tomb and are of the XIth Dynasty (see Fig. 6, p. 8). Besides these cones, a very rough sandstone table of offerings without inscription, two Coptic pots, one with a wooden lid, some fragments of leather sandals, and a granite colour-grinder, were found dispersed in the drifted sand. _Site 4._ A large tomb, facing west, high up on the mountain slope, with a causeway some twenty-five metres broad, walled on either side with rough stones, and leading down the face of the hill. Like the tomb itself the façade is hewn in the rock; its right and left wings and overhead retaining wall, now mostly destroyed, were built of mud-brick. The passage and chambers being open for many centuries the task here was to clear the façade court, into which its walls had fallen and been covered with rubbish drifted in from the desert above. It was discovered that the floor of the court, owing to the sloping rock bed, had been levelled and made good with stone rubble faced with lime mortar. The enormous fissures in the rock which ran through from side to side along its transverse axis had been treated in the same way. In the centre of the court, before the tomb entrance, was a large square shaft, sunk into the rock and formed mostly out of the natural fissures, previously mentioned, which had been utilized by the ancients in its construction. At the bottom of this shaft was the sarcophagus chamber, with its doorway blocked by a sandstone portcullis of one piece, measuring two metres high and one and a half metres broad. The sarcophagus chamber was rectangular in shape, low, and just large enough to receive the burial, i.e. the sarcophagus with the funereal equipment. At the south-east side of the court, buried beneath the fallen bricks of that side wing, is a small unfinished chamber.