Afterwards it was despoiled by the Kopts in erasing the worship of Osiris. It is the early state of the place as the tomb of King Zer that we have to study here, and not its later history. The tomb chamber has been built of wood; and the brick cells around it were built subsequently against the wooden chamber, as their rough, unplastered ends show; moreover, the cast of the grain of the wood can be seen on the mud mortar adhering to the bricks. There are also long, shallow grooves in the floor, a wide one near the west wall, three narrow ones parallel to that, and a short cross groove, all probably the places of beams which supported the wooden chamber. Besides these there was till recently a great mass of carbonised wood along the north side of the floor. This was probably part of the flooring of the tomb, which, beneath the woodwork, was covered with a layer of bricks, which lay on clean sand. But all the middle of the tomb had been cleared to the native marl for building the Osiris shrine, of which some fragments of sculpture in hard limestone are now all that remain. A strange feature here is that of the red recesses, such as were also found in the tomb of Zet. The large ones are on the west wall, and in the second cell on the north wall. No meaning can yet be assigned to these, except as spirit-entrances to the cells of offerings, like the false doors in tombs of the Old Kingdom. In spite of the plundering of the tombs in various ages, the work of the Egypt Exploration Fund was so thorough that not a few gold objects have been found in the course of recent excavations. By far the most important discovery of recent years was that of some jewelry in the tomb of King Zer. The story of this find is so entertaining, and illustrates so admirably the method of the modern scientific explorer, that we give the account of it in Professor Petrie's own words: