[236] All these steles are figured in the last work published by Mariette, the Catalogue général des Monuments d'Abydos, découverts pendant les Fouilles de cette Ville, 1 vol. 4to. Paris, 1880.
[237] Mariette, Voyage dans la Haute-Égypte, vol. i. p. 51.
[238] Maspero, Rapport sur une Mission en Italie (in the Recueil de Travaux, vol. ii. p. 166). The Abbott Papyrus gives a list of these little pyramids.
[239] [Fig. 172] reproduces only a part of the long plate given in Wilkinson. In order to bring the more important groups within the scope of one page, we have been compelled to omit the central portion, which consists principally of columns of hieroglyphs.
[240] See the description of the Valley of the Kings in the Lettres d'Égypte et de Nubie of Champollion (p. 183 of the second edition).
[241] Ebers, indeed, found something of the same kind in the temple of Abydos. He found there a cenotaph consecrated to his own memory by Seti I. This cenotaph was near the tomb of Osiris, while the king himself was buried in the Theban necropolis. (Ægypten, pp. 234, 235.)
[242] The beautiful little temple of Dayr-el-Medinet, begun by Ptolemy Philopator and finished by his successors, especially by Physco, has often been considered a funerary monument. It is alleged that the situation of the temple in the necropolis, and the nature of the subjects represented in the interior, particularly in the Western Chamber, prove that it was so. If we accept this opinion, we must look upon the temple as a mere freak of fancy, suggested to Ptolemy Philopator by a journey to Thebes. The Greek prince was interred far from it, and it could have formed no part of his tomb.
[243] Mariette, Deir-el-Bahari, § 1. (Atlas, folio, Leipsic, 1877, with 40 pages letterpress, 4to.)
[244] Diodorus, i. §§ 47-49.
[245] This must have been the structure which Strabo calls the Memnonium, and near to which he seems to place the two colossi (xvii. p. 816). The true name of the author of both temple and colossi might easily be confused with that of the mythical Greek personage which the Hellenic imagination persisted in discovering everywhere in Egypt, and the similarity of sound must have helped to perpetuate the mistake among all the foreign travellers who visited the country. A curious passage in Pausanias (Attica, 42) shows us, however, that the Egyptian scholars of his time knew how properly to convey the name of the prince represented in the colossi to foreigners: "I was less struck by that marvel," he says, in speaking of some sonorous stone which was shown to him at Megara, "than by a colossal statue which I saw beyond the Nile in Egypt, not far from the pipes. This colossus is a statue of the sun, or of Memnon, according to the common tradition. It is said that Memnon came from Ethiopia into Egypt, and that he penetrated as far as Susa. But the Thebans themselves deny that it is Memnon. They declare that it represents Phamenoph (Φάμενοφ), who was born in their own country...." The story told by Philostratus (Life of Apollonius, l. vi. p. 232) of the visit of the sorcerer to Memnon, shows that in his time the colossus was surrounded by nothing but ruins, such as broken columns and architraves, fragmentary walls and shattered statues. Even then the monumental completeness of the "Amenophium" had vanished.