The thing which determined his fate was a passage from the old geographer and historian Strabo. The god of Memphis, the most ancient capital of Egypt, was Ptah, the artificer-god, who was supposed to become incarnate in the sacred bull Apis. As each successive Apis died, it was buried with all the reverence and splendour due to an incarnation of Divinity, in a special necropolis at Saqqara. Later in the complicated story of Egyptian religion Apis was identified with the god of the Underworld, Osiris, and was called Osiris-Apis, and the Greeks speedily corrupted this into Serapis, and called the burial-place of the Apis bulls the Serapeum. Now Strabo, in writing his account of Egypt, inserted the following passage about this ancient bull-cemetery. “One finds also [at Memphis] a temple of Serapis in a spot so sandy that the wind causes the sand to accumulate in heaps, under which we could see many sphinxes, some of them almost entirely buried, others only partially covered; from which we may conjecture that the route leading to this temple might be attended with danger if one were surprised by a sudden gust of wind.” While Mariette was pursuing his inquiries after Coptic manuscripts, he noticed in a garden at Alexandria several sphinxes, and shortly after, when at Cairo, he came across several more of the same type, while more still were found at Gizeh. It was plain that there was somewhere not far off some storehouse of sphinxes which was being plundered to furnish ornaments for the gardens of local officials. The matter lay in Mariette’s mind until one day when he was at Saqqara he noticed the head of a similar sphinx sticking up out of the sand. Searching round about it, he found a libation-tablet, inscribed with a dedication to Osiris-Apis. At once Strabo’s statement occurred to his mind, and he realised that he was standing over the avenue of sphinxes which the ancient writer refers to. Coptic manuscripts went to the winds. Without apparently asking permission of anybody, “almost furtively,” as he says himself, Mariette gathered a handful of workmen, and began the excavation. “The first attempts were hard indeed,” he says; “but before very long lions and peacocks, and the Grecian statues of the dromos, together with the monumental tablets or _stelæ_ of the temple of Nectanebo, were drawn out of the sand, and I was able to announce my success to the French Government, informing them, at the same time, that the funds placed at my disposal for the researches after the manuscripts were entirely exhausted, and that a further grant was indispensable. Thus was begun the discovery of the Serapeum.”