The story of excavation at the Pyramids of Gizeh has nothing very exciting about it. The first excavators were, no doubt, the enemies of the Crown, who, as Petrie has suggested, penetrated into the burial-chambers in the troubled days between the VIIth and Xth Dynasties and wreaked their spite on the bodies of their dead masters. Thereafter, through the Classical period, the entrance into the subterranean passages of the Great Pyramid was well known; but the knowledge had been lost by the time of the Arab Conquest, and the Khalif Mamun had laboriously to quarry his way through the masonry into the actual passages, leaving behind him the great hole, which is still called “Mamun’s Hole.” This was the beginning of the vandalism which has done so much destruction at the Pyramids of Gizeh, though the worst efforts of human stupidity have somehow only seemed to emphasise the dignity and grandeur of the great buildings whose might mocks at the puny attempts of the destroyer. After Mamun had showed the way, his successors followed him, and used the pyramid as a quarry. In 1356 Sultan Hasan used part of the casing of the Great Pyramid in the building of his mosque, and though his work may be, as it has been called, “the finest monument in Cairo,” and “the most perfect specimen extant of Saracenic architecture,” its beauty is sadly discounted by the fact that it was created by the robbery of the most magnificent example of an architecture more ancient and more noble. Hasan, or one of his immediate successors, added to his crime by stripping part of the casing from the Second Pyramid also, leaving it in the partially despoiled condition in which it now appears, for one of his coins was found by Petrie deep down in the southern foundation. Compared with such barbarities, the indignities which the Pyramids have had to suffer in all ages at the hands of tourists, who have insisted on disgracing their undistinguished names by scrawling them on these great memorials of the past, are mere trifles.