Professor Smyth owns that the grooves and pin holes which the coffer in
the King's Chamber presents, were (to use his own words) "in fact to
admit a sliding sarcophagus cover or lid" (see _ante_, p. 236,
footnote). But in his recent communication to the Royal Society on the
20th April, he doubted Al Hakm's account of the mummy having been
actually found in the sarcophagus when the King's Chamber was first
entered by the Caliph Al Mamoon, in the ninth century, arguing, on the
authority of a Glasgow gentleman, that the historian himself, Al Hakm,
did not live for three or four centuries afterwards, and, therefore,
could not be relied upon. But all this reasoning or assertion is simply
a mistake. In a late letter (7th April), Dr. Rieu of the British
Museum,--the chief living authority among us on any such Arabic
question,--writes, "The statement relating to Al Mamoon's discovery
could hardly rest on a better authority than that of Ibn Abd Al Hakm;
for not only was he a contemporary writer (having died at Old Cairo,
A.H. 269, that is, thirty-eight years after Al Mamoon's death), but he
is constantly quoted by later writers as an historian of the highest
authority. You will find a notice of him in Khallikan's _Biographical
Dictionary_, vol. ii. etc." He was a native of Egypt, and chief of the
Shafite sect. Born in A.D. 799, he died in A.D. 882, or at the age of
83.