As the inscription of Aahmes which records the building of the dummy pyramid of Teta-shera is of considerable interest, it may here be translated. The text reads: “It came to pass that when his Majesty the king, even the king of South and North, Neb-pehti-Râ, Son of the Sun, Aahmes, Giver of Life, was taking his pleasure in the tjadu-hall, the hereditary princess greatly favoured and greatly prized, the king’s daughter, the king’s sister, the god’s wife and great wife of the king, Nefret-ari-Aahmes, the living, was in the presence of his Majesty. And the one spake unto the other, seeking to do honour to These There,[[1]] which consisteth in the pouring of water, the offering upon the altar, the painting of the stele at the beginning of each season, at the Festival of the New Moon, at the feast of the month, the feast of the going-forth of the Sem-priest, the Ceremonies of the Night, the Feasts of the Fifth Day of the Month and of the Sixth, the Hak-festival, the Uag-festival, the feast of Thoth, the beginning of every season of heaven and earth. And his sister spake, answering him: ‘Why hath one remembered these matters, and wherefore hath this word been said? Prithee, what hath come into thy heart?’ The king spake, saying: ‘As for me, I have remembered the mother of my mother, the mother of my father, the king’s great wife and king’s mother Teta-shera, deceased, whose tomb-chamber and mer-ahât are at this moment upon the soil of Thebes and Abydos. I have spoken thus unto thee because my Majesty desireth to cause a pyramid and chapel to be made for her in the Sacred Land, as a gift of a monument from my Majesty, and that its lake should be dug, its trees planted, and its offerings prescribed; that it should be provided with slaves, furnished with lands, and endowed with cattle, with hen-ka priests and kher-heb priests performing their duties, each man knowing what he hath to do.’ Behold! when his Majesty had thus spoken, these things were immediately carried out. His Majesty did these things on account of the greatness of the love which he bore her, which was greater than anything. Never had ancestral kings done the like for their mothers. Behold! his Majesty extended his arm and bent his hand, and made for her the king’s offering to Geb, to the Ennead of Gods, to the lesser Ennead of Gods... [to Anubis] in the God’s Shrine, thousands of offerings of bread, beer, oxen, geese, cattle... to [the Queen Teta-shera].” This is one of the most interesting inscriptions discovered in Egypt in recent years, for the picturesqueness of its diction is unusual.
[1] A polite periphrasis for the dead.
As has already been said, the king Amenhetep I was also buried in the Dra’ Abu-’l-Negga, but the tomb has not yet been found. Amenhetep I and his mother, Queen Nefret-ari-Aahmes, who is mentioned in the inscription translated above, were both venerated as tutelary demons of the Western Necropolis of Thebes after their deaths, as also was Mentuhetep III. At Dêr el-Bahari both kings seem to have been worshipped with Hathor, the Mistress of the Waste. The worship of Amen-Râ in the XVIIIth Dynasty temple of Dêr el-Bahari was a novelty introduced by the priests of Amen at that time. But the worship of Hathor went on side by side with that of Amen in a chapel with a rock-cut shrine at the side of the Great Temple. Very possibly this was the original cave-shrine of Hathor, long before Mentuhetep’s time, and was incorporated with the Great Temple and beautified with the addition of a pillared hall before it, built over part of the XIth Dynasty north court and wall, by Hatshepsu’s architects.
The Great Temple, the excavation of which for the Egypt Exploration Fund was successfully brought to an end by Prof. Naville in 1898, was erected by Queen Hatshepsu in honour of Amen-Râ, her father Thothmes I, and her brother-husband Thothmes II, and received a few additions from Thothmes III, her successor. He, however, did not complete it, and it fell into disrepair, besides suffering from the iconoclastic zeal of the heretic Akhunaten, who hammered out some of the beautifully painted scenes upon its walls. These were badly restored by Ramses II, whose painting is easily distinguished from the original work by the dulness and badness of its colour.
The peculiar plan and other remarkable characteristics of this temple are well known. Its great terraces, with the ramps leading up to them, flanked by colonnades, which, as we have seen, were imitated from the design of the old XIth Dynasty temple at its side, are familiar from a hundred illustrations, and the marvellously preserved colouring of its delicate reliefs is known to every winter visitor to Egypt, and can be realized by those who have never been there through the medium of Mr. Howard Carter’s wonderful coloured reproductions, published in Prof. Naville’s edition of the temple by the Egypt Exploration Fund. The Great Temple stands to-day clear of all the débris which used to cover it, a lasting monument to the work of the greatest of the societies which busy themselves with the unearthing of the relics of the ancient world.
The two temples of Dêr el-Bahari will soon stand side by side, as they originally stood, and will always be associated with the name of the society which rescued them from oblivion, and gave us the treasures of the royal tombs at Abydos. The names of the two men whom the Egypt Exploration Fund commissioned to excavate Dêr el-Bahari and Abydos, and for whose work it exclusively supplied the funds, Profs. Naville and Petrie, will live chiefly in connection with their work at Dêr el-Bahari and Abydos.
The Egyptians called the two temples Tjeserti, “the two holy places,” the new building receiving the name of Tjeser-tjesru, “Holy of Holies,” and the whole tract of Dêr el-Bahari the appellation Tjesret, “the Holy.” The extraordinary beauty of the situation in which they are placed, with its huge cliffs and rugged hillsides, may be appreciated from the photograph which is taken from a steep path half-way up the cliff above the Great Temple. In it we see the Great Temple in the foreground with the modern roofs of two of its colonnades, devised in order to protect the sculptures beneath them, the great trilithon gate leading to the upper court, and the entrance to the cave-shrine of Amen-Râ, with the niches of the kings on either side, immediately at the foot of the cliff. In the middle distance is the duller form of the XIth Dynasty temple, with its rectangular platform, the ramp leading up to it, and the pyramid in the centre of it, surrounded by pillars, half-emerging from the great heaps of sand and débris all around. The background of cliffs and hills, as seen in the photograph, will serve to give some idea of the beauty of the surroundings,—an arid beauty, it is true, for all is desert. There is not a blade of vegetation near; all is salmon-red in colour beneath a sky of ineffable blue, and against the red cliffs the white temple stands out in vivid contrast.
The second illustration gives a nearer view of the great trilithon gate in the upper court, at the head of the ramp. The long hill of Dra’ Abu-’l-Negga is seen bending away northward behind the gate.