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Exterior Walls (1100-1400 AD), Nan Douwas, Nan Madol, Micronesia
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Elk III, John
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TIME Magazine, Monday, Jan. 27, 1947

The pick & shovel corps of Science toils far afield, probing the earth for traces of vanished animals, men and civilizations. Recent doings of the diggers:

Young Egypt. Last November, Dr. Walter Bryan Emery, British archeologist in the service of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities, climbed a desert bluff at Sakkara within sight of the pyramids of Giza. Below lay the fertile checkerboard fields of the flat Nile valley. A few miles away peasants grazed their goats among the jumbled ruins of Memphis, first capital of Egypt.

The bluff's surface was littered with fragments of pottery and alabaster, but these were modern for Egypt, perhaps 2,000 years old. Dr. Emery was not interested in them. He sized up the lay of the land. Then he pointed, like a "dowser" sensing a deep vein of water. "There's something big," he said, "and very old under there."

His pick-&-shovel men sank a shaft laboriously through layers of "recent" graves. Below the lowest they found what they sought: a great tomb 50 ft. wide and 150 ft. long. It was built of sun-dried mud brick, not finely chiseled stone, for it dated from the dim beginning years, when Great-Grandmother Egypt herself was young.

The royal tomb, second largest and the oldest ever found, had been looted by grave robbers before the pyramids were started, but it still contained plenty of relics for modern archeologists. Crude hieroglyphics identified it as the tomb of Queen Mereneith, wife of Zer, second (or third) Pharaoh of Egypt's First Dynasty. Date: about 3400 B.C.

Like their descendants for 30 centuries, those early Egyptians were dark with the thought of death, and of the perilous journey to the other world. Commoners had to travel light, but Queen Mereneith got a bang-up traveling outfit. Her body was rubbed with resin, wrapped in cloth strips with the arms outside (not strapped to the side, as in later mummies) and placed in a wooden sarcophagus. In the walls of the tomb, brightly painted like a palace interior, were false doors through which her soul could escape. She had all the furniture she might need, and plenty of food and wine, sealed safely in pottery vessels.

The Queen did not travel alone. In 23 small tombs around her royal chamber lay skeletons of her servants, killed at her death to attend her on the journey. Each had the special tools of his trade so he could serve his mistress. Beside a sacrificed painter lay his paint pots. A boat-builder's skilled spirit hands would provide for the Queen's transportation on the Nile of the other world.

Continued Diggers, Page 2