Like the passageway between Rooms II and III, the thicknesses of the passage between Room III and IV bore personifications of the agricultural estates belonging to Inti’s funerary endowment. Today the walls are denuded to the third course of masonry and only the lower portions of the bottom registers remain with the legs and feet of the estates and the animals they were leading, all facing into Room IV, as if they were entering into it (pls. 34b, 35c; fig. 59a—b). A few hieroglyphs from the estate names also survive.
Sketches of the thicknesses, drawings of a few details, and copies of the estate names were made by Mariette.490 Jacquet-Gordon utilized these and her own personal copies of the few signs remaining in her study of funerary estates in the Old Kingdom.491 The Rev. Lieder and his wife Alice made paper squeezes of the thicknesses, and these were utilized by Jaromir Malek to correct the names of certain of the estates in an article published in 1974.492
Mariette copied the thicknesses when they were preserved to the height of two registers. As in the passageway between Rooms II and III, there were presumably three registers of estates originally. Mariette’s sketches of the thicknesses (fig. 58) are very approximate and misleading on a number of counts.493 Ten female figures are shown on either thickness, five in each register, carrying in baskets on their heads the produce of the estates whose names were inscribed before them. In the sketches, each figure raises a front hand to help balance her burden, while the other hand hangs empty behind. It is clear even from Mariette’s larger scale renderings of a few representative estates that this was not always the case.494 The first figure in the upper register of the left thickness, for example, actually raised her rear hand to steady her basket and held stems of papyrus in her other hand. In addition, the third figure on the left thickness has a hemispherical basket on her head on one page, but is shown with a conical basket on another.495
The paper squeezes made by the Lieders convey a clearer picture of the appearance of the two thicknesses (pls. 35a—b, 36a—b). Unfortunately, folds and tears in the squeezes, as well as their relatively poor technical quality, obscure some of the details. Furthermore, either the Lieders themselves or a third party once again outlined the figures and hieroglpyhs in pencil and did not always do so with accuracy.
Each estate apparently wore a tight-fitting shift held in place by tapering shoulder straps, a beaded collar, and a long wig with a lappet falling over the near shoulder and hanging down to the level of the top of the dress. As on the thicknesses between Rooms II and III, the hems of the dresses slant from front to back (except perhaps the last estate on the right jamb). The estate names incorporate the cartouches of six Fifth Dynasty rulers: Userkaf, Sahure, Neferirkare (Kakai), Neuserre (Ini), Menkauhor (Ikauhor), and Izezi. With few excep-
Tions, the transliterations and translations of the estate names follow Jacquet-Gordon and Malek.
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