Those which I have seen elsewhere, and, generally speaking, all simulacra of offerings, as loaves, cakes, heads of oxen or gazelles, bunches of black grapes, and the like, in carved and painted limestone, are of doubtful taste and clumsy execution.

They are not very common, and I have met with them only in tombs of the Fifth and Twelfth Dynasties.

"Canopic" vases, on the contrary, were always carefully wrought.
They were generally made in two kinds of stone, limestone and alabaster; but the heads which surmounted them were often of painted wood.

The canopic vases of Pepi I.are of alabaster; and those of a king buried in the southernmost pyramid at Lisht are also of alabaster, as are the human heads upon the lids.

One, indeed, is of such fine execution that I can only compare it with that of the statue of Khafra.