Theoretically, every Egyptian was entitled to an eternal dwelling constructed after the plan which I have here described with its successive modifications; but the poorer folk were fain to do without those things which were the necessities of the wealthier dead.  They were buried wherever it was cheapest—­in old tombs which had been ransacked and abandoned; in the natural clefts of the rock; or in common pits.  At Thebes, in the time of the Ramessides, great trenches dug in the sand awaited their remains.  The funeral rites once performed, the grave-diggers cast a thin covering of sand over the day’s mummies, sometimes in lots of two or three, and sometimes in piles which they did not even take the trouble to lay in regular layers.  Some were protected only by their bandages; others were wrapped about with palm-branches, lashed in the fashion of a game-basket.  Those most cared for lie in boxes of rough-hewn wood, neither painted nor inscribed.  Many are huddled into old coffins which have not even been altered to suit the size of the new occupant, or into a composite contrivance made of the fragments of three or four broken mummy-cases.  As to funerary furniture, it was out of the question for such poor souls as these.  A pair of sandals of painted cardboard or plaited reeds; a staff for walking along the heavenly highways; a ring of enamelled ware; a bracelet or necklace of little blue beads; a tiny image of Ptah, of Osiris, of Anubis, of Hathor, or of Bast; a few mystic eyes or scarabs; and, above all, a twist or two of cord round the arm, the neck, the leg, or the body, intended to preserve the corpse from magical influences,—­are the only possessions of the pauper dead.

[31] For a full account of the Twelfth Dynasty tombs at Beni Hasan and El
    Bersheh see the first memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of the
    Egypt Exploration Fund.

[32] The steps are shown in fig. 150.  They were discovered by General Sir
    F. Grenfell in 1885.  Noting the remains of two parallel walls running
    up from the water’s edge to a part of the cliff which had evidently
    been escarped and presented a vertical face, General Grenfell caused
    the sand to be cleared, thus disclosing the entrances to several rock-
    cut tombs dating from the Sixth and Twelfth Dynasties, as well as two
    flights of steps on either side of an inclined plane leading from the
    Nile bank to the door of one of the tombs.  The distance between the
    two walls is ten feet.  The steps are eighteen inches deep, and 250 in
    number.  The steps were for the haulers, the mummies and sarcophagi
    being dragged up the inclined plane. (See p. 209.)—­A.B.E.

[33] M. Lefebure has lately produced a superb and elaborate volume on this
    tomb, with the whole of the texts and the wall decorations faithfully
    reproduced:  Memoires publies par les Membres de la Mission du
    Caire, Vol.  II., fasc.  I.—­A.B.E.