Of all the variety of vases fashioned by Greeks and Etruscans, the types of the different forms we find existed long before in Egypt, and these vases have been buried in tombs—large underground chambers that are the counterparts of Egyptian tombs—and they have been placed there to please the spirits of the dead, by devoting to them the things that were most loved, most prized, during life. They used the sarcophagus, though they did not mummify or embalm the dead, but laid out the body dressed in its garments, or encased in armour of the period, with strappings of copper and bronze bosses for breastplates, placing it on a stone bier surrounded by its treasures, often of great value, and leaving it to moulder into dust by natural decay. The paintings on the walls of these dwelling rooms of the dead illustrate banquets and scenes of domestic and public life, and afford us most valuable indications of the ways and manners of long past days. A large number of these chambered tombs have been opened, with their treasures untouched since the day of burial. The first that was discovered was by the chance pushing aside and uprooting of a bush by a peasant tending his goats at evening, who, looking through the opening he had made, the setting sun throwing its light into the chamber, was seized with mortal fear at the sight his eyes fell upon; rushing home to his people he described what he saw, the body lying there dressed in the habit as it lived. The next day, however, no body was there, only the figure of it in little heaps of dust, and the metal links and the two round breast bosses fallen, indenting the dust. Those who explored the tomb and recovered its treasures were inclined to the belief that the peasant did see the human form, but that, as in similar cases that are known, it collapsed upon the admission of air and light. The tombs were rock hewn, or built of stone and then covered with earth appearing as mere tumuli. The chambers many of them being twenty feet by twelve, and superstition asserts that in more than one instance lamps were found still burning with perpetual fire although fifteen or twenty centuries had elapsed since they were lighted. The painting described in the last chapter, copied from one in a tomb at Corneto (meaning at the necropolis of Tarquinii, the ancient city) shows very clearly that the earliest double flutes possessed by these people were of the Egyptian kind, with a similar form of reed; and this same design I have also found on one or two vases, and also evidently the same style is meant in other instances, in which the details are not worked out, in both paintings and vases. Thus far we trace the connection between Etruria and Egypt as regards the flutes, with Greece as a continuing link.