The Third Pyramid, that of Menkaura, was opened in 1226 by treasure-hunters. “After passing through various passages, a room was reached wherein was found a long blue vessel [the sarcophagus] quite empty.... They found in this basin, after they had broken the covering of it, the decayed remains of a man, but no treasures, excepting some golden tablets inscribed with characters of a language which nobody could understand.” The disappointed treasure-seekers were succeeded in 1837 by Colonel Howard Vyse, some of the results of whose discoveries are in the British Museum in the shape of a fragment of the basalt sarcophagus, and portions of a wooden coffin, purporting to be that of “the King of the North and South, Men-kau-Ra, living for ever,” together with the remains of a man, wrapped in a coarse woollen cloth of a yellow colour. “In clearing the rubbish out of the large entrance room,” says Colonel Vyse, “after the men had been employed there several days and had advanced some distance towards the south-eastern corner, some bones were first discovered at the bottom of the rubbish; and the remaining bones and part of the coffin were immediately discovered all together. No other parts of the coffin or bones could be found in the room; I therefore had the rubbish which had been previously turned out of the same room carefully re-examined, when several pieces of the coffin and of the mummy-cloth were found; but in no other part of the pyramid were any parts of it to be discovered, although every place was most minutely examined, to make the coffin as complete as possible.” Unfortunately some doubt exists as to the coffin being actually of the period which its inscription claims, and the same doubt hangs over the remains. It has been suggested that the coffin is a restoration of the time of the XXVIth Dynasty, and that the remains are not those of Menkaura, but of one of the treasure-hunters who lost his life in the attempt of 1226. Accordingly we cannot say, as might otherwise have been the case, that Vyse actually discovered a Pharaoh in the great tomb which he had built for his eternal abode. The fine basalt sarcophagus was taken out of the pyramid by Vyse, and shipped for England in 1838; but the ill-luck which has dogged the pyramid explorations attended Menkaura’s coffin also. The ship left Leghorn on October 12, 1838, and was never heard of again, though some bits of wreckage were picked up off Carthagena. Valuable work was done at Gizeh during the years after Vyse’s researches by Perring and Piazzi Smyth, though the careful measurement work of the latter was somewhat obscured by the fanciful theories which possessed his mind on the subject of the purpose of the Great Pyramid; but the most complete survey of the Gizeh field was due to Flinders Petrie, who in 1880–1881 measured and planned the whole site with the most scrupulous care.