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22-08-2015, 07:58

North Wall, East of Entrance

The procession of offering bearers continued on the north wall to the east of the entrance (pls. 49a-b, fig. 66). The lower legs and feet of seven figures remain. Only in the case of the fifth figure from the left does any trace of an offering, probably the bottom of a wickerwork frail, survive.



Room V, an east-west pillared hall, measures 5.57 by 10.7 m and has an area of 59.60 sq. m.609° The heavy stone roofing of the hall was carried on two massive east-west architraves which crossed the room in five spans with the aid of eight pillars (pl. 51a). The pillars were square and rested on square bases. When Lepsius excavated the mas-taba in 1842-43, the pillared hall appears to have been largely intact, although the architrave between the east wall and the easternmost pillar of the southern row was cracked, and had to be propped up by a support.610 By the time Reisner cleared the pillared hall in November, 1912, whereas the architrave resting on the northern row of pillars was still intact, only the central part of the southern architrave was still in place (fig. 3). Eleven intact roofing blocks from the northernmost row rested on the northern architrave, three blocks spanned the space between the two architraves, and two blocks rested on the southern architrave. Assuming the other roofing slabs were of approximately equal size, there would originally have been thirty-three slabs. The height of the hall of pillars from floor to ceiling is 3.25 m, the height of the base being 0.10 m, the height of the pillars 2.60 m, and the height of the architrave 0.55 m. According to Reisner, the height of the roof was 2.25 m thick, but it stands to reason that this figure includes the rubble fill between the ceiling and the roof. Behind the west wall of the hall is a large serdab (Serdab I) connected with it by three slots. The serdab is a north-south room measuring 1.14 by 5.23 m with a total area of 5.95 sq. m. The height, 2.70 m, was the same as the height from the floor to the bottom of the architrave in the pillared hall. The three slot-windows open in the hall in the fifth course of masonry (above 1.5 m). The serdab was found empty with a robber’s hole penetrating laterally from the hall and with a roofing slab removed from the south end of the room. A neckless model shoulder jar of copper was found in the hole.572



Except for the door thicknesses, there are no reliefs or inscriptions on any of the walls of the pillared hall. Indeed, the surface of the walls has been left rough, so that the uninscribed state may have been intentional.573



 

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