queen's successful expedition to Punt. Everywhere will be seen the marks of the erasure of the queen's name which was carried out by Thothmes III. her ward, who hated Hatshepset with a deadly hatred; in many places will be found marks of the vandalism of Amenophis IV., who erased the name and figure of the god Åmen from the walls because he hated this god and preferred to worship Åten; and everywhere will be seen the cartouche of Rameses II. who, because in places he tried to repair the mischief done by Amenophis IV., added his own name wherever possible. At the end of the building is a small rectangular court, which is entered through a granite gateway, and directly opposite it is a rock-hewn shrine with a vaulted roof. plan of the temple given on p. 404 is from Mariette's work,* and will be found useful; from it, however, the reader would think that the northern part of the buildings on the Western Terrace was similar to that on the south, but this is not so. The total length of the whole building, not including the Avenue of Sphinxes, was about 800 feet.

The

Hatshepset, the builder of the temple, was the daughter of Thothmes I. and of his half-sister Aāḥmes, and the granddaughter of Amenophis I. and one of his wives; her father, however, had two other wives, Mut-nefert, called Senseneb, who bore him a son, Thothmes II., and Åset, or Isis, a woman of low rank, who also bore him a son, Thothmes III. Hatshepset was half-sister to Thothmes II. and Thothmes III., and she became the wife of the former and the guardian of the latter, their half-brother. The inscriptions on her temple record that she was associated with her father, Thothmes I., in the rule of the kingdom, and that she herself was enthroned at a very early age. From her childhood she is always represented in male attire, and in the inscriptions, masculine pronouns and

* Deir-el-Bahari, Leipzig, 1877.

verbal forms are used in speaking of her, and masculine attributes, including a beard, are ascribed to her; only when considered as a goddess is she represented in female form. She reigned for about 16 years, and the chief event of her reign, omitting the building of the temple, was the famous expedition to Punt, a general name of the land on both sides of the Red Sea as far south as, and including, Somaliland. The queen sent five ships to the coast of Africa, and M. Maspero believes that they were sailed by their crews up the Elephant River, near Cape Guardafui, and made fast near one of the native villages inland. Then followed the exchange of objects brought from Egypt for native produce, and the natives appear to have given large quantities of gold in return for almost valueless articles. The bas-reliefs which illustrate these scenes are found on the southern half of the wall which supports the Western Terrace, and it is easy to see that what the natives are giving to the Egyptians is both valuable and bulky. The chief of Punt, called Pa-rehu, carries a boomerang and wears a dagger in his belt; he is followed by his wife, a lady with a remarkable figure, who wears a single yellow garment and a necklace, and by his two sons and a daughter. The following drawing illustrates this scene.

Pa-rehu, the Prince of Punt, his wife and his two sons, and a daughter. (This portion of the relief was stolen from the temple, and has not been recovered.)

The native products given by the Prince of Punt to the Egyptians consisted of aromatic woods, spices, incense,

anti, rare trees and plants, which were afterwards planted in the gardens of Amen at Thebes, gold, etc.: these things

An Egyptian ship being loaded by the people of Punt.
(After Mariette.)

were given to the Egyptians in such large quantities that
their boats were filled with them, and they formed a very
substantial offering to the god Amen. Among the gifts of
the Prince of Punt were leopards, panthers, and other wild
animals. Hatshepset seems to have been a capable ruler
and administrator, but the conquests of foreign lands during
her reign were few. Her husband, Thothmes II., waged
war against the nomad, raiding tribes of the Eastern Desert,
and he conducted a campaign of considerable importance
in Nubia; he seems to have died while he was compara-
tively young.
After his death Hatshepset associated
Thothmes III. with her in the rule of the kingdom, but, as
after her death he always obliterated her name from her
temple, it seems that the relations between the rulers were
not always happy. M. Naville thinks that Thothmes III.
hated Hatshepset because her husband, Thothmes II., had
not raised his (Thothmes III.'s) mother Åset to royal rank,
and that he was jealous of his mother's honour; Hatshepset
had no son, and she seems to have been obliged to associate
Åset's son with her in the rule of the kingdom. Thothmes
III. seems to have married first Neferu-Ra, a daughter of

Ḥatshepset, and secondly, another daughter of the great queen called Hatshepset-meri-Ra. It would be unjust to the memory of a great man and a loyal servant of Hatshepset if we omitted to mention the name of Senmut, the architect and overseer of works of Dêr el-Baḥarî. There is little doubt that the plan of the temple was his, but it says much for the good sense of the ablest woman who ever sat on the throne of Egypt, that she gave this distinguished architect the opportunity of building the unique and beautiful temple, which has shed glory on the name, both of the subject and of his great sovereign. The visitor to the temple of Dêr el-Baḥarî owes the ease with which he is able to visit every part of it to the labours of M. Naville, assisted by Mr. Hogarth, who spent three winters in clearing it at the expense of the Egypt Exploration Fund. An idea of the vastness of the work may be gleaned from the fact that in two winters the enormous amount of 60,000 cubic metres of rubbish and stones were removed from the site and carried away to a distance of 200 yards. This temple now presents a striking appearance, whether seen from the Luxor or Kûrna side, and every visitor will much appreciate the excellent results which have attended the completion of the undertaking.* Archeologists will be interested to know that the newly found fragments of the wall upon which the expedition to Punt is depicted all agree in pointing to the eastern side of Africa as the country which the Egyptians called Punt; some of the animals. in the reliefs are identical with those found to this day on the Abyssinian coast, and the general products of the two countries are the same. Punt was famous for its ebony, and all tradition agrees in making Abyssinia, and the countries south and east of it, the home of the ebony

* M. Naville's description of the temple has been published under the title, "The Temple of Deir el Bahari," 4 parts, London, 1894-1898.

tree. The tombs at Dêr el-Baḥarî were opened many, many years ago, and a very large number of the coffins with which Mariette furnished the first Egyptian Museum at Bûlâk came from them; since that time the whole site has been carefully searched by diggers for antiquities, hence comparatively few antiquities have been unearthed by M. Naville. In the course of the work he discovered an interesting mummy-pit, and in a small chamber hewn in the solid rock, about twelve feet below the pavement, he found three wooden rectangular coffins (each containing two inner coffins), with arched lids, wooden hawks and jackals, wreaths of flowers, and a box containing a large number of ushabtiu figures. These coffins contained the mummies of a priest called Menthu-Teḥuti-auf-ankh, and of his mother and of his aunt; they belong to the period of the XXVIth dynasty, or perhaps a little earlier.

The great interest which attaches to the name of the able queen Hatshepset, and the romantic circumstances under which she lived and reigned, have induced many to endeavour to discover her mummy and her tomb; up to the present however, all search has failed to bring either to light. During his excavations M. Naville has kept this fact steadily before him, and he eventually found a place which, he says, was not improbably her tomb. In the passage between the retaining wall of the middle platform and the enclosure he came upon an inclined plane cut in the rock and leading to the entrance of a large tomb. The rubbish was untouched; the slope had evidently been made for a large stone coffin; beyond the entrance he found a long sloping shaft which ended in a large chamber. The plain coffin containing bones which he found therein had never been intended for such a tomb, and his conclusion is that the body for whom the tomb was inade was never laid in it. It may be that it was prepared for Hätshepset herself.

During the last days of the excavations at Dêr el-Bahari