MORE FINDS AT THE STEP PYRAMID

Evening Star, Issue 19855, 2 May 1928, Page 1

MORE FINDS AT THE STEP PYRAMID

REMARKABLE SERIES OF HIOBEH CHAMBERS Air Cecil Firth, who is excavating at Sakhara on behalf of the Antiquities Department, lias made a remarkable discovery of chambers hitherto unknown in the burial apartments ot Pharaoh Zoscr under the Step Pyramid. Trio maze of passages and rooms under that pyramid has been explored over and over again during a century without detecting the newly discovered apartments. Except for the great granite chamber tho new rooms form the most important part of tho underground complex. One of these rooms was piled with a mass of tine stone vessels ot many forms and of different materials (principally alabaster and diorite), and somo were inscribed with the names of the older kings. The walls are lined with blue tiles, and in one of the room.s are three limestone stelae decorated with beautiful low reliefs in the finest third dynasty style of Zoscr, like thoso discovered last year in the great tomb of the southern enclosing wall. The new rooms are almost a duplicate of the apartments of the southern tomb, so that no doubt is left that the southern tomb was originally prepared for Zoscr himself. It is supposed that the excavation of the southern tomb revealed to the workmen tho fact that the rock there was.unsuitable for tho great pyramid designed to be built, and consequently a second tomb, which includes the newly discovered chambers, was excavated farther north under the place where tho Step Pyramid was finally'built. The great southern tomb was then used for the burial place ot some other person—a queen, or perhaps the great architect Imhotep himself, who planned and executed the whole wonderful construction 5,000 years ago. It is hoped to settle the identity of that person in the course of the excavations sill in hand. One of the low reliefs was seen to be covered with small squares ruled off with black lines for the purpose ot exact copying. This was done over two thousand years after Zosev's death in the Saite period during the so-called Egyptian Renaissance when Egyptian artists in their attempts to revive the old sculptural art sought out and copied monuments of tho Pyramid Age. At that time some Egyptian craftsmen, with a wick lamp in hand, crept through the maze of passages to this room, and, taken with the beauty of the relief, sat copying by the dim light of his lamp tho figure of Zoser for reproduction, on a monument of the Pharaoh of his day.