646 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H; 
found, showing that such glazing was commonly in use. As a whole, we get a 
view of the population, apart from the wealth of the King and Court, and see 
that they had good furniture, fine vases, and plenty of ornament, and were 
apparently in quite as civilised a condition as the Egyptians of later ages. The 
physical character and origin of these people are dealt with in a separate paper 
(see p. 640). 
Another site, at Gerzeh, a few miles further south, has given good results of 
the Twelfth and Eighteenth Dynasties. Large cemeteries were cleared and some 
immense stone tombs with chambers as large as those of pyramids. One large 
tomb had been attacked anciently ; the plunderer had crawled in by a small hole, 
and had begun to remove the ornaments, when the roof fell and crushed him. 
Thus was saved for our days a gold pectoral inlaid with coloured stones, like the 
pectorals of the celebrated jewellery of Dahshur, in the Cairo Museum, the only 
specimen of this splendid work of the Twelfth Dynasty that has been seen in 
England. With it was part of a similar jewel of Senusert II. and a gold shell of 
Senusert ITT. 
At Memphis more statuary and sculptures of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth 
Dynasties have been found, in clearing another acre and a half of the great 
Temple of Ptah; we further learn that Shishak decorated the temple with a 
cornice. Gradually the great clearance of this historic site is extended year by 
year; and it is hoped that the new law, by which the Government claims every- 
thing found in private land, will not be exercised to check this work. In the 
city some workshops have yielded all the various stages of the manufacture of 
stone vases, from the rough block to the vase spoiled in finishing; other shops 
contained a great variety of coloured stones brought from the Eastern Desert and 
from abroad, including the beautiful bright green felspar in granite, not known 
before. A remarkable standard measure was found, of Ptolemaic age, parallel 
lines over a foot long being engraved on a slab rather over two feet in length. 
The accuracy of the scale is finer than a hundredth of an inch; the standard 
is a cubit of 26-8 inches, known in Egypt under the Eighteenth Dynasty, and 
used in Asia Minor, classical Germany, and medieval England. 
8. The Evolution of the Dolmen. 
By Professor G. Exuiot Smirn, M.A., M.D., F.B.S. 
Of all the varieties of the ‘rude stone monuments’ that are scattered far 
and wide throughout the world as witnesses to a past and forgotten stage of 
prehistoric culture, the dolmen is perhaps the commonest, and certainly the 
crudest, and the type that hitherto has appeared most hopelessly inexplicable. 
The aim of this demonstration is to prove that the dolmen represents a. 
degraded form of the typical Egyptian tomb (mastaba) of the Pyramid Age. 
The essential parts of such a tomb in its fully developed form were a deep 
shaft leading to the subterranean rock-cut burial chamber; a mound of rubble, 
surrounding the upper opening of the shaft, enclosed within four stone retain- 
ing walls, forming an oblong superstructure—the mastaba; a chapel of offer- 
ings on the side of the mastaba facing the River Nile (and as it became the 
fashion in the Pyramid Age, when the Sun-god, Ra, gained an ascendency in 
the estimation of the Egyptians, to build these tombs on the west bank the 
temple thus, as a rule, faced east); in the chapel, let into the eastern wall of 
the mastaba, was a false door or stela (symbolic of the means of communication 
with the dead), before which offerings of food were made to the deceased ; 
and hidden in the mastaba, somewhere between the chapel and the’ shaft 
leading to the burial chamber, was a chamber—the serdab—surrounded and 
roofed with great slabs of stone, in which a statue of the deceased was placed. 
The serdab was often put into communication with the chapel by means of a 
narrow, slit-like opening, so that the statue, which ‘served as a body for the 
disembodied dead’ (Breasted)—the actual mummy being far away at the 
bottom of the deep shaft, secure against the desecration of tomb plunderers— 
might be able to receive the offerings presented in the chapel. 
This idea of the dead man’s spirit dwelling in the serdab appealed strongly 
to the imagination of a superstitious race, and the conception of the serdab 
