In detail, the ‘battered’ boundary wall, averaging nearly 6 metres in height, was capped by a coping-stone curved on the top. The base of its outer face declines from the level of the Upper Court down to the level of the Lower Court, a matter of nearly 4·50 metres difference in level; while, on the inner side, the base is horizontal and takes the levels of the two courts. When looking at the plan ([Pl. XXX]) it will be noticed that the wall gradually swells on the outer face between the two sections, viz. the Upper and Lower Courts, and suddenly returns to its normal thickness. This can be explained by the fact that a ‘battered’ surface must necessarily spread as it descends to a lower level. It was at this point (the level of the Lower Court) blended back to the normal base measurement of the wall by a small angle of masonry (see [Pl. XXXI]. 1).
The Lower Court, as far as the excavation shows us, seems to be a plain open quadrangle, abutting a raised terrace colonnade, of which one base alone of the square columns of the Terrace still exists. Above this Terrace, the back of which served as a retaining wall, is what we can only suppose to be the Upper Court, and like the lower one is a square open enclosure. On the north side of this Upper Court is a doorway (mentioned above) in the boundary wall. Behind the masonry of the Terrace are the remains of the original mud-brick scaffold for supporting the earth of the Upper Court while building the back stone wall of the Terrace itself. The masonry in some cases is good, while in others it is of the roughest kind, and in many parts the surfaces have been left undressed.
Hieratic inscriptions, written in ink upon the under surfaces of the stone blocks from the walls (see [Fig. 10]), name the architect ‘the Second Priest of Amen, Pu-am-ra’, whose tomb (dated Thothmes III) is in the Assassif.
This fixed the date of the monument to the reign of Queen Hatshepsût or Thothmes III, but to which of these two reigns, and for what use the edifice was intended, still remained unanswered for want of further data.
Later, in the year 1911, we at last discovered a foundation deposit of the building (see [Pl. XXX], marked Hatshepsût’s Deposit A and B), and here a small brick pillar and model tools gave the owner’s name, ‘Maat-ka-ra’ (the prenomen of Queen Hatshepsût), and on the tools themselves was the name of the building ‘Zeser-zeseru’. The occurrence of these names shows at once that the building formed part and parcel of the Dêr el Bahari edifice, and from its position it is clear that the building was the termination of the dromos of the famous temple—in fact its Portal or ‘Valley’-Temple—assimilating in idea the older plan of the pyramid chapels and ‘valley’-temples connected by great causeways of the pyramids at Gizeh, the tomb which takes the place of the pyramid being in this case on the opposite side of the cliff in the valley of the Tombs of the Kings.