Machine summary:
Besides the animals, weapons, such as harpoons with their coiled ropes, were sometimes painted on the Egyptian pots, surrogates of the real ones usually deposited in the graves, also the boats which conveyed the hunters to their chosen grounds, often marshes which then spread over much of the Nile valley and were them• selves symbolized by reeds depicted on the pots: these additions were doubtless intended to fortify the magic virtues of the pots by their more emphatic circumstanti• ality and constitute, in fact, the first steps towards the greater elaboration of the later tomb-scenes; they have their parallel in the more developed paintings of later paleeolithic times when the animals were exhibited on the cave walls as if transfixed by javelins, while in the inter• mediate period between the Old and the New Stone Ages, the Epipalseolithic, hunting scenes were common and often included men shooting with bows and arrows.
Nearly contemporary with this tomb is that of Methen, now in the Berlin Museum, in which not only were the dead man's provisions depicted but also, for additional security, the servants bringing them to him; further, as he was Chief Huntsman to the king, his hounds were brought into the scene = these details furnish a link between the earlier period and that of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, some two hundred years later.