TAA i.3.9.17

                                        –           13            –    

in the process of clearing up. Such an object</>is the little bundles

of gold rings of great intrinsic, as well as artistic<,> value,

found in one of the boxes.

          These rings are very interesting from another point of

view. They wer<e> found tied up in one of the king’s scarves in the

manner in which children – and others – tie money up in the corner

of their/<a> hankerchief^sic, and the manner in which the fellah of

Egypt to this day ties up money in a corner of his head-shawl.

The cloth is twisted round the coin two or three times and then

tied in a knot. These rings were tied up in this way, and it can

only have been s/<t>he work of one of the robbers. But how did this

little bundle come to be left in the tomb?. – so valuable and

yet so handy to carry off. One can only conclude that either the 

robbers were actually caught red-handed in the tomb, or were

traced with some of the loot still on them. This is also a

plausible explanation of why there were still many pieces of

gold work and jewellery left in the tomb which were small enough

to be portable but of such a size <that> they could not have been over-

looked.

          I should here say that the tomb was plundered twice, at

least. It seems probable that the first robbery took place dir-

ectly after the funeral ceremonies: at any rate, it occurred when

the passage between the first and second doors was empty, for in

digging away the material which filled the passage many broken

scattered broken objects were found on the floor and the stair-

case. Then the passage was filled in by the officials and the

second robbery, or the last, took place by the thieves tunnelling

a hole through this passage, as I have already mentioned. It was

after this that the officials sealed the doors and refilled the