“Immediately after these first bands, are found various idols in gold, bronze, varnished terra cotta, wood, gilded or painted, rolls of papyri manuscripts, and many other objects which have no relation to the religion of these people, but which appear to be only souvenirs of objects cherished during life. It was in one of these mummies, placed in the bottom of a cave of the interior of the mountain, (behind the Memnonium temple of the plain of Thebes,) that I found a voluminous papyrus, which will be found engraved in the work. (Vide the plates 61, 62, 63, 64 and 65, of the second vol. of the plates of antiquities, and the description of the Hypogees of the city of Thebes.) This papyrus was rolled upon itself, and had been placed between the thighs of the patient, immediately after the first bandages of linen; this male mummy, the trunk of which was broken, did not appear to me to have been embalmed in a first rate manner; it had been enveloped in an ordinary linen cloth, and had been filled with asphaltum: the nails of the toes had alone been gilded. “Almost all the mummies which are found in the subterranean caverns, which can yet be penetrated, are thus enveloped with linen bandages, with a painted masque on the face. It is rare to find any enclosed in cases, of which some wrecks only remain at the present day. These cases, which served doubtless, only for the rich, or for persons of distinction, were double; those in which the mummies were deposited, were made of a kind of carton or pasteboard, composed of many pieces glued together; this case was subsequently enclosed in a second, constructed of the wood of sycamore or cedar.” It results, if we are not mistaken, from the analogy of so many carefully made observations, a consequence to which we might not have arrived by long continued reasoning: simple embalming might have been practised among the Egyptians from the earliest period of their civilization, without a very exact knowledge of the laws of preservation of animal matter, and before the other arts were far advanced. A description of the Plain of Mummies by M. de Maillet, will give to this opinion, already so firmly established, the value of a demonstrated truth.