of Den, which is of large black bricks over smaller red burnt
bricks. It is therefore quite beside the mark to attribute this burning
to the Kopts.

The tomb of King Zer has an important secondary history as the site of
the shrine of Osiris, established in the eighteenth dynasty (for none of
the pottery offered there is earlier than that of Amenhothes III.), and
visited with offerings from that time until the twenty-sixth dynasty,
when additional sculptures were placed here.

[Illustration: 368.jpg TOMB OF ZER, 4700 B.C.]

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:

"While my workmen were clearing the to