Yet the cunning and the skill of the XIIth Dynasty architects and masons proved as helpless as the massive power of the IVth Dynasty to protect the dead monarchs from the ravages of hatred or greed. Nor were the elaborate precautions of Amenemhat III any more successful than those of his grandfather had been. Petrie’s description of the construction of the inner passages of Amenemhat’s pyramid at Hawara reads like something planned to be a nightmare to explorers. “The explorer,” he says, “who had found the entrance in the unusual place on the south side, descended a long staircase, which ended in a dumb chamber. The roof of this, if slid aside, showed another passage, which was filled with blocks. This was a mere blind, to divert attention from the real passage, which stood ostentatiously open. A plunderer has, however, fruitlessly mined his way through all these blocks. On going down the real passage, another dumb chamber was reached; another sliding trap-door was passed; another passage led to a third dumb chamber; a third trap-door was passed; and now a passage led along past one side of the real sepulchre; and to amuse explorers, two false wells open in the passage floor, and the wrong side of the passage is filled with masonry blocks fitted in. Yet by some means the plunderers found a cross trench in the passage floor which led to the chamber. Here another device was met. The chamber had no door, but was entered solely by one of the immense roof-blocks, weighing 45 tons, being left raised, and afterwards dropped into place on closing the pyramid.” One would have imagined that with such precautions the sleep of Amenemhat would surely be undisturbed; but when Petrie in 1889 tunnelled his way through the roofing-beams of the sepulchral chamber he found that an early plunderer had anticipated him by mining right through the great 45-ton block. “The royal interments had been entirely burnt; and only fired grains of diorite and pieces of lazuli inlaying showed the splendour of the decorations of the coffins.” Here, as in all the other cases of the pyramids, the very elaboration of the means adopted for the preservation of the dead body of the king had only whetted the appetite of the spoiler and destroyer, and little has survived from the XIIth Dynasty pyramids to reward the modern explorer. The great finds in the XIIth Dynasty pyramid fields were all from outside the pyramids. Of these one of the most valuable, though by no means the most spectacular, was Petrie’s discovery, near the pyramid of Senusert II at Lahun, of the town, created specially for the occasion, in which the workmen of Senusert had lived with their staff of architects, overseers, and scribes, while the pyramid was under construction.