with which they were endowed, and everything meet to be offered to the ghost of the king whom they served.  The plan of the place had evidently been altered after the time of Ramses II, as remains of overbuilding were found here and there.  The magazines were first investigated in 1896 by Prof.  Petrie, who also found in the neighbourhood the remains of a number of small royal funerary temples of the XVIIIth Dynasty, all looking in the direction of the hill, beyond which lay the tombs of the kings.

[Illustration:  372.jpg THE VALLEY OF THE TOMBS OF THE QUEENS AT THEBES.]

     In which Prof.  Schiaparelli discovered the tomb of Ramses
     II’s wife (1904).

We may now turn to Luxor, where immediately above the landing-place of the steamers and dahabiyas rise the stately coloured colonnades of the Temple of Luxor.  Unfortunately, modern excavations have not been allowed to pursue their course to completion here, as in the first great colonnaded court, which was added by Ramses II to the original building of Amenhetep III, Tutankhamen, and Horemheb, there still remains the Mohammedan Mosque of Abu-’l-Haggag, which may not be removed.  Abu-’l-Haggag, “the Father of Pilgrims” (so called on account of the number of pilgrims to his shrine), was a very holy shekh, and his memory is held in the greatest reverence by the Luksuris.  It is unlucky that this mosque was built within the court of the Great Temple, and it cannot be removed till Moslem religious prejudices become at least partially ameliorated, and then the work of completely excavating the Temple of Luxor may be carried out.

Between Luxor and Karnak lay the temple of the goddess Mut, consort of Amen and protectress of Thebes.  It stood in the part of the city known as Asheru.  This building was cleared in 1895 at the expense and under the supervision of two English ladies, Miss Benson and Miss Gourlay.

[Illustration:  374.jpg THE NILE-BANK AT LUXOR]

     With A Dahabiya And A Steamer Of The Anglo-American Nile
     Company.

The temple had always been remarkable on account of the prodigious number of seated figures of the lioness-headed goddess Sekhemet, or Pakhet, which it contains, dedicated by Amenhetep III and Sheshenk I; most of those in the British Museum were brought from this temple.  The excavators found many more of them, and also some very interesting portrait-statues of the late period which had been dedicated there.  The most important of these was the head and shoulders of a statue of Mentuemhat, governor of Thebes at the time of the sack of the city by Ashur-bani-pal of Assyria in 668 B.C.  In Miss Benson’s interesting book, The Temple of Mut in Asher, it is suggested, on the authority of Prof.  Petrie, that his facial type is Cypriote, but this speculation is a dangerous one, as is also the similar speculation that the wonderful portrait-head of an old man found by Miss Benson [* Plate vii of her book.] is of Philistine type.  We have only to look at the faces of elderly Egyptians to-day to see that the types presented by Mentuemhat and Miss Benson’s “Philistine” need be nothing but pure Egyptian.  The whole work of the clearing was most efficiently carried out, and the Cairo Museum obtained from it some valuable specimens of Egyptian sculpture.