gift of a monument from my Majesty, and that its lake should be dug, its trees planted, and its offerings prescribed; that it should be provided with slaves, furnished with lands, and endowed with cattle, with hen-ka priests and kher-heb priests performing their duties, each man knowing what he hath to do.’  Behold! when his Majesty had thus spoken, these things were immediately carried out.  His Majesty did these things on account of the greatness of the love which he bore her, which was greater than anything.  Never had ancestral kings done the like for their mothers.  Behold! his Majesty extended his arm and bent his hand, and made for her the king’s offering to Geb, to the Ennead of Gods, to the lesser Ennead of Gods... [to Anubis] in the God’s Shrine, thousands of offerings of bread, beer, oxen, geese, cattle... to [the Queen Teta-shera].”  This is one of the most interesting inscriptions discovered in Egypt in recent years, for the picturesqueness of its diction is unusual.

     * A polite periphrasis for the dead.

As has already been said, the king Amenhetep I was also buried in the Dra’ Abu-’l-Negga, but the tomb has not yet been found.  Amenhetep I and his mother, Queen Nefret-ari-Aahmes, who is mentioned in the inscription translated above, were both venerated as tutelary demons of the Western Necropolis of Thebes after their deaths, as also was Mentuhetep III.  At Der el-Bahari both kings seem to have been worshipped with Hathor, the Mistress of the Waste.  The worship of Amen-Ra in the XVIIIth Dynasty temple of Der el-Bahari was a novelty introduced by the priests of Amen at that time.  But the worship of Hathor went on side by side with that of Amen in a chapel with a rock-cut shrine at the side of the Great Temple.  Very possibly this was the original cave-shrine of Hathor, long before Mentuhetep’s time, and was incorporated with the Great Temple and beautified with the addition of a pillared hall before it, built over part of the XIth Dynasty north court and wall, by Hatshepsu’s architects.

The Great Temple, the excavation of which for the Egypt Exploration Fund was successfully brought to an end by Prof.  Naville in 1898, was erected by Queen Hatshepsu in honour of Amen-Ra, her father Thothmes I, and her brother-husband Thothmes II, and received a few additions from Thothmes III, her successor.  He, however, did not complete it, and it fell into disrepair, besides suffering from the iconoclastic zeal of the heretic Akhunaten, who hammered out some of the beautifully painted scenes upon its walls.  These were badly restored by Ramses II, whose painting is easily distinguished from the original work by the dulness and badness of its colour.