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SOMETHING WHICH HERODOTUS MAY HAVE SEEN

who bends down to pick up a handful of dust to put it on her face and head. A search in the very numerous published scenes of funerals in Theban tombs¹¹ has revealed only two parallels to this posturę ¹², which is strange because it occurs in a vignette ofthe Book of the Dead of Hunefer¹³, a Theban papyrus dating from the early XIXth Dynasty, but apparently it was usually omitted from the standard repertoire of scenes used by the artists who decorated the Theban tombs ¹⁴. As a rule the Theban artists represented a woman performing this action either in a squatting or in a kneeling position¹⁵, these attitudes perhaps being morę elegant. From Saqqara, however, there are at least two examples of this action being performed by standing persons, both dated to the XVllIth-XlXth Dynasties, one now in the Leiden Museum showing a woman¹⁶ and the other in the Moscow' Museum showing, very unexpectedly, a man ¹⁷.

From a technical point of vicw, the four priests depicted at the head of the procession carryingon theirshouldersa shrine-shaped chest supported on poles provide a good example ofthe freedom allowed to Egyptian artists to vary the scalę of individual elements in the composition of a scenc, but the contrast in this case is particularly striking. If the upper part of the frame within which the scene is enclosed had been occupicd.by vertical columns of inscription, the artist would doubtless have carved either shorter columns or nonę at all above the shrine, so that it could project upwards above the level of the heads of all the mourners and thereby the disparity in size would have been reduced¹⁸. The shrine very probably contained the Canopicjars, but the presence ofthe boy — presumably a son of the deceased person — who accompanies it is hard to understand. In a com-parable scene in the Theban tomb of Amenmose (No. 89) a woman, probably the widów, walks beside the shrine¹⁹ and in the Leiden relief from the tomb of Merymery an official is shown in that position²⁰.

About half ofthe entire field is occupied by the central group of six małe mourners, including a priest and another naked boy. The additional space is necessary because the

" See PM I², Part I. p. 471.

¹²    N. dc G. Davies. The Tomb of Two Sculptors at Thebes, p. 42 and pl. 19. Id., The Tomb of Nefer-hotep at Tltebes. pl. 21.

¹³    Budge. Facsimiles of the Papyri of Hunefer, Anhai, Kerasher and Netchmet, pl. 7.

Werbrouck. o.c., p. 106. commcnting on the fcmalc mourners in the vignette. remarks: «Nous irouvons dans Ic groupe une altitudc inconnuc des plcurcuses des tombes : la femme debout. pcnchćc en avant jusqua louchcr la terre des mains». Mile Werbrouck may havc overlooked the instances quoted in n. 12 above, but cqually she may have assumed that the woman was squatting.

¹⁵    O.c., p. 149, fig. 144 and 150.

¹⁶    Bocser. Beschreibung der aegyptischen Sammtung des niederldndischen Reichsmuseums der Altertiimer in Leiden. IV, pl. 15: Werbrouck, o.c., pl. 36.

^l~ See Matthieu. The Art oj Ancien! Egypt (ATU 1961. No. 61472), 421. n. 52 (p. 559). pl. 201 (p. 419).

¹⁸    Compare the scene in Boeser. I.c. A wall-painting in the Ramesside tomb of Kyky at Thebes (No. 409) shows a man and two boys, dad in kilts, escorting the shrine (see Abdul-Qader Muhammed. ASAE 59. 171, pl. 22).

¹⁹    Werbrouck, o.c.. p. 46. fig. 27.

²⁰    Boeser. I.c.