The first object which struck the eye of Herr Brugsch, when he reached the bottom of the pit, was a white and yellow coffin, with the name of Nesi-Khonsu. It was in the corridor, about two feet from the entrance; a little further was a coffin whose form recalled the style of the XVIIth Dynasty; then Queen TiuHathor Hont-tui, then Seti I. Alongside the coffins and strewing the ground, were boxes of funeral statuettes, canopic vases,[7] bronze libation vases, and right at the back, in the angle formed by the corridor as it turns north, the funeral canopy of Queen Isiem-kheb, folded and crumpled like a worthless object which some priest in a hurry to get away had thrown carelessly in a corner. All along the great corridor was the same confusion and disorder; it was necessary to crawl along without knowing where hands and knees were being placed.
The coffins and mummies, hastily scanned by the light of a candle, bore historic names--Amenhotep I, Tehutimes II, in the niche near the staircase, Aahmes I, and his son Se-Amen, Seqenen-Ra, Queens Aah-hotep, Aahmes, Nefert-ari, and others. In the chamber at the end, the confusion was at its height, but the predominance of the style proper to the XXth Dynasty was recognised at a glance. The report of Muhammed Ahmad Abd-er-Rassul, which had at first appeared exaggerated, was scarcely more than the attenuated expression of the truth: where I had expected to come on one or two obscure, petty kings, the Arabs had unearthed a whole hypogee of Pharaohs.
And what Pharaohs! perhaps the most illustrious in the history of Egypt--Tehutimes III and Seti I, Aahmes the liberator and Ramses II the conqueror!
Two hours sufficed for this first examination, and then the work of removal began. Three hundred Arabs were speedily collected by the efforts of the mudir’s people, and set about the work. The museum’s boat, hastily summoned, had not yet arrived; but reis Muhammed, one of the pilots on whom reliance could be placed, was on the spot. He descended to the bottom of the pit and undertook to extract its contents. Messrs. Brugsch and Ahmad Effendi Kamal received the objects as they were brought above ground, carried them to the foot of the hill, and ranged them side by side without relaxing their vigilance for a moment. Forty-eight hours of energetic labour sufficed to exhume everything; but the task was only half finished.