580 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1914. 
For several years M. Petrie had attracted attention to what he 
called the Osireion. He had discovered a passageway leading to a 
room ornamented with funereal paintings showing a scene of worship 
rendered to Osiris. In this passageway was a side door before which 
M. Petrie was stopped and which he shows upon his map to be a 
passage leading to the temple of Séti, situated about 80 meters from 
this door. 
Following close upon a number of excavations in these cemeteries, 
it was decided that we would examine all that was in the space which 
separated the temple from that door, and we commenced this work 
two years ago. We first found an inclined corridor, completely 
filled with débris, whose walls are covered with texts from the Book 
of the Dead from the time of Menephtah, the son of Rameses II, 
King of the Exodus. This corridor which was 14 meters long, was 
formerly covered by a ceiling made of large blocks of sandstone all 
but one of which have been taken away. It ends in what we first 
thought ‘to be two lateral chambers. Now we have found that it is 
a single great hall, with corbelled ceiling and the walls covered with 
funereal paintings of Menephtah. 
Opposite the corridor in the east wall of the hall there is a doorway, 
the triple lintel of which was found two years ago, composed of three 
stones 5 meters long. We have found that this doorway crossed a 
wall 4 meters thick. It seemed as if beyond it we might discern two 
undiscovered rooms. It was only a lack of funds that stopped us. 
When we left the place, we had before us.a space about 50 meters long 
covered with sand that must be cleared out to some unknown depth, 
and close to the temple there was a very high mound made by the 
excavations of Mariette. This pile has since been removed by the 
Service of Antiquities. It was evident, however, that we could not 
reach the Osireion until we had the necessary funds for making the 
excavation on a large scale. So we did not work during the winter 
of 1912. One can judge of the importance of the excavation from 
the fact that to-day we have 639 workmen, two-thirds of whom are 
children carrying baskets. It is the greatest work that the Egypt 
Exploration Fund has undertaken. 
On December 23 we were installed in two crude brick houses built 
for us in the desert. My collaborators that year were Mr. Whitte- 
more of Boston, and Messrs. Wainwright and Gibson, both Engtish- 
men. After we had begun, I thought that beyond the door discovered 
two years ago we might reach the entrance of a passage leading to the 
subterranean sanctuary, consecrated to what is called the double of 
Osiris; that is, a kind of bodyless shadow which forms part of the 
person. 
T should never have expected to see what we really unearthed. 
Between the doorway with enormous lintels and the temple of Séti I 
