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come to call the "basilica" type of religious architecture. I suppose we have at Karnak the very oldest known example of that general style.

Behind the great hall with the columns comes the main part of the entire sanctuary with two smaller hypostyle apartments and the labyrinth of chambers for the priests, which are common to all temples of the period. This part of the building is in a sad state of ruin. But enough remains to make it clear that Rameses simply followed the established style of temple architecture in erecting his mortuary shrine,—just as Seti did at Kurna, but on a more elaborate scale.

The uses of the shrine were undoubtedly the regular ones common to all ka chapels, ancient and otherwise. If there was a difference it was in the exaggerated scale. The Pharaoh established for his maintenance through all eternity a truly regal menu - a Gargantuan feast of fowl, beeves, pheasants, geese, beer, bread, and so on. It was to be served in a house worthy a deified king. Let the common herd be satisfied with reproductions of earthly mansions for their shades; Rameses would have for his eternal abode no mere palace, but a temple of the faith, more modest than Ammon's, perhaps, but only a trifle more so! And to the end that food and drink should not fail, he provided immense treasure-vaults and cellars for the supplies, both within the temple and all around it.

To this magnificence had developed the modest little room in the ancient mastaba of the desert.

We passed from the Ramesseum to a kindred shrine a mile or so away, inspecting but briefly as we went a small Ptolemaic shrine sacred to Hathor, remarkable for little save its extraordinary mural decorations. The ultimate goal was the temple now commonly called Medinat-Habû, which is in reality the mortuary temple of Rameses III.

Of this one may say in general that it is a later replica of the Ramesseum, built by a succeeding monarch for precisely the same purposes and on the same general plan. In many ways, however, it is better preserved than the Ramesseum and affords in consequence rather more pleasure. Its walls and towers relate the mundane glory of the Pharaoh's reign, his conquests abroad and his splendor at home. In its remoter chambers and courts, now flooded with sunlight, there are innumerable reliefs portraying scenes from the life here and hereafter, involving a bewildering succession of sculptures and a perplexing array of gods and goddesses.

In an especial manner it served to help out our conception of the general scope and purpose of the Ramesseum by presenting its plan for a second time with greater completeness. Its perfection largely supplies the defects which time has wrought in its older

prototype, and gives the clearest idea of the last development of the ka temple before the decline and fall of the Egyptian empire.

I have been trying to reconstruct mentally the appearance of the western bank in the day of its glory, in the light of what we have been permitted to see. It was the official and visible necropolis—a sort of proxy for the real cemetery over behind the hills which was so carefully hid. The broad expanse of the plain was sown thick with the sanctuaries of a long succession of Theban monarchs whose graves were otherwhere. At the northern end of the line we have seen the shrine of Seti. At the southern end we have seen the similar but grander sanctuary of Rameses III. Between, we have passed the vast temple of Rameses the Great. But of the other shrines sacred to the earlier Theban kings, such as Thutmosis and Amenhôtep, we have seen almost nothing because almost nothing remains.

There is, however, a notable exception, namely, the two sitting colossi of "Memnon," which are in reality the defaced and irrecognizable portrait-statues of Amenhotep III, that once adorned his shrine. These two seated giants we passed on our way to the ship, alone in the midst of the meadows and terribly mutilated by time. Of the gate and temple which these figures adorned there is nothing left. As por

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