The second discovery came in February, 1914, when Professor Petrie’s workmen were clearing a rifled tomb belonging to the “Royal daughter Sat-Hathor-ant” at Lahun near the pyramid of Senusert II. How the treasure of Lahun had ever escaped the plunderers who had rifled the tomb is a mystery. “The tomb had been attacked,” says Petrie; “the long and heavy work of shifting the massive granite lid of the sarcophagus, and breaking it away, had been achieved; yet all this gold was left in the recess of the passage untouched.... The whole treasure seems to have been stacked in the recess at the time of the burial, and to have gradually dropped apart as the wooden caskets decayed in course of years, with repeated flooding of storm water and mud slowly washed into the pit.... The whole treasure was standing in an open recess, within arm’s reach of the gold-seekers, while they worked at breaking open the granite sarcophagus.” We can only be thankful that all the luck did not go to the ancient robber, and that, like his earlier companion who left the arm of the Ist Dynasty queen, with its jewelled bracelets, at Abydos, he overlooked something to tell a later age of the skill and taste of ancient Egypt. [Illustration: 8. _Above_, CROWNS OF GOLD INLAID WITH STONES OF KHNUMIT. _Below_, GRANULATED GOLD WORK. ALL XIIth DYNASTY. (_From “Arts and Crafts of Ancient Egypt.”_)] The chief feature of the Lahun find was a perfect specimen of a royal diadem, bearing the uræus on its front. No actual specimen of the famous double crown of Egypt has ever come to light, familiar though its appearance may be, probably because its materials were of a perishable nature; but the diadem of Lahun gives us a unique specimen of such a crown as Egyptian royalty may often have worn in preference to the cumbrous mitre so frequently figured. “It is formed by a broad band of highly burnished gold over an inch wide, and large enough to pass round the bushy wig worn in the XIIth Dynasty. The uræus is of open work, inlaid with lazuli and carnelian; the head is of lazuli, which was found loose in the mud. Around the polished band were affixed fifteen rosettes, each composed of four flowers with intermediate buds. At the back a tube of gold was riveted on to the band, and into that fitted a double plume of sheet gold, the stem of which slipped through a flower of solid gold. The thickness of the plumes was such that they would wave slightly with every movement of the head. At the back and sides of the crown were streamers of gold, which hung from hinges attached to the rosettes. The whole construction was over a foot and a half high.” Such was an Egyptian diadem in the great days of the Middle Kingdom, and surely never did a royal head wear a more graceful emblem of sovereignty than that which came so strangely to light in 1914.