Excerpt from A Topographical Catalogue of the Private Tombs of Thebes

Some errors of judgment have occurred: thus 180 does not deserve a number. A large number of tombs seen and noted by Champollion, Lepsius and others have not been rediscovered, and no mention of these will be found in this book. It is intended later on to publish a larger volume giving a full account and bibliography of all the Theban Private Tombs, whether these have been located or not, and to this further work the reader must be referred for whatever he misses here. In the interests of accuracy it has been sought to exclude such tombs as could not be investigated and verified, the gradual way in which the list has been compiled is responsible for the retention of a few tombs that form exceptions to this rule, such as 34, 47 and 146, none of which has been entered by me. Certain other tombs, the exact location of which is known, have been omitted for the reason that I have been unable to visit them. Thus in the same court as 19 is the tomb of Pyiay discovered by M. Gauthier (bulletin llmtitut fmnpaz's, VI, pp. 148 this is at present blocked up.

The numbers employed in this Catalogue are the same as will be found marked outside the actual tombs, it is greatly hoped that these will meet with general acceptance. It will be noted that the numbering follows no topographical order. It will pain the pedantically-minded - I confess it is not wholly pleasant even to myself - that, for example, tomb 42 should adjoin 110, and access be had to 145 from 17. Such incongruities are for the most part due to the succession in which the tombs were discovered, in practice they do not in any way impair the utility of the numbering. The purpose in assigning numbers to the tombs is to provide a series of abbreviations to be used in_quotation, and so long as the numbers given are easily referred to in a printed Catalogue it matters little what order they follow. Any attempt to modify our numbering at the present juncture would introduce serious confusion into the already somewhat chaotic literature of Egyptology. Scholars are therefore begged to make Shift with it, whatever its imperfections.

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