The Royal Barber

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 930, 25 March 1930, Page 8

The Royal Barber

EGYPTIAN TOMB EXCAVATED

A TOMB recently discovered close to the Sphinx by Egyptian excavators appears to have belonged to a Pooh-Bah of ancient Egypt. The inscriptions found on this tomb, which is the largest ever excavated in the country, reveal that it contained the remains of Ea Ouer, High Priest of Nekheb, Goddess of Upper and Lower Egypt.

Ra Ouer, in addition to his position as high priest was also an intimate friend of the king, Master of the Royal Wardrobe, Major-domo of the Palace, the King’s Barber, Keeper of the Royal Ablutionary Water and a priest of the God Mena. He filled many other posts also. v The tomb is so large that It resembles a temple, having an entrance 93ft long, followed by a long subterranean passage leading to three large halls, whose walls almost reach the Sphinx. There are SO small chambers and 30 serdabs or labyrinthine passag'es for the erection of statues to the dead.

Priestly Influence was very strong at their courts and the chief events recorded for the dynasty are gifts and endowments for the temples. Papyrus documents narrate that three of the kings of the dynasty were born of a priestess of the sun. The fourth and fifth dynasties probably marked the height of Egyptian mastery of art, of grandeur and conception. The fourth dynasty saw the great pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) come into being. That dynasty also marked the great expression of character and dignity In the portrait sculpture and the creation of a mass of detail for tombs. During the fitfh and sixth dynasties Egypt retained its great civilisation, diminished in some respects, with wider diffusion, but less care and splendour. The earliest belief about gods in Egypt, so far as is known, is tribal morotheism, of which traces remain in the early historical writings. Each tribe in the Nile Valley seems to have had a separate divinity. Four great classes of gods can be distinguished, the animal gods of the earliest population, the Osiride gods in human form of Western origin, the Solar gods of Eastern origin, and the abstract gods, as the Father God, Mother Goddess, Creator God, Goddess of Truth, and so on. Excavation of the buried treasures of Egypt was begun in the 18th century, but was carried on In a very desultory fashion and mainly for the purposes of curiasity and gain. Later a highly specialised branch of study came into existence. Recently a number of interesting tombs have been opened, including the famous Tutankhamen’s. The base of the Sphinx has also been excavated to permit the claws of the kneeling monolith to be seen and the discovery of the tomb of the high priest and royal barber is probably connected with this latter work.

Forty-five such statues have been recovered, mostly in perfect condition, and two of them are of the high priest. For the first time in the history of Egyptology, three statues have been found of one person, all cut out of one piece of stone. Another interesting find consists of two flint razors, apparently emblems of the high priest’s tonsorial duties.' These were still sharp enough to cut hair on the excavators’ arms. One sensational discovery was that of a man’s dismembered hand inserted in the coffin of a mummy which contained a beautiful necklace in precious stones. A further search revealed the man’s skeleton, minus the hand, on the g'round near the sarcophagus. It is presumed that he was a robber who was killed while in the act of rifling the coffin, by a subsidence of the tomb’s ceiling. Ra Ouer lived during the reign of the third king of the fifth dynasty— Neferririka-Ra, who died in 2730 8.0. This period was the age of sun worship, the kings of this dynasty adoring the sun as their ancestor. The goddess Kekheb was regarded as the protecting deity of their Upper Egypt domain. She was represented either as a vulture or a's a woman wearing a gown.