The pyramids show him to have been one of the great master-builders of the world in respect of the vastness of his creations; the temples, often scarcely less impressive in this respect, show him to have been also a master in the art of constructing stately and nobly proportioned examples of that art of the column and architrave of which the temples of Hellas gave the supreme demonstration. The question of how much the Greek owed to the earlier builder may still be the subject of debate; but there can be no question of the originality of the architects who gave to the world such noble specimens of the builder’s art as the great colonnades of Karnak and Luxor, the beautiful terraces of Der el-Bahri, and the later glories of Edfu and Philæ. In one sense there can be comparatively little to tell in the way of a story of excavation with regard to the Egyptian temples. In Mesopotamia and Babylonia the remains of the great temples of Anu and Adad, of Enlil, and of Marduk, owe their restoration to the light of day entirely to the spade of the excavator, for they were completely buried beneath the dust of ages in the great mounds of Ashur, Nippur, and Babylon, and almost nothing was visible to tell of their former splendours till the modern excavator patiently stripped away the mantle in which time had wrapped them. But the temples of Egypt had never experienced the oblivion which had covered their northern rivals. They had suffered, indeed, many things at the hands of Time and of human vandalism. Sometimes they were half-buried in the sand which had risen higher and higher, century after century, around their columns; sometimes the shrines of a rival faith had been thrust incongruously into their ruined courts, or an Arab village had grown up like an ugly parasite on their roofs; but there always remained enough to tell that the work of one of the great master-building races of the world was there, waiting the time when it should be stripped of these paltry accretions, and revealed in its full beauty. Karnak, Luxor, Edfu, Dendera, and their companion shrines were never quite forgotten, and even Hatshepsut’s exquisite terraces at Der el-Bahri, half-smothered beneath the sand, and wrecked by Coptic fanaticism though they were, still showed enough to enable the first European explorers who described them (MM. Jollois and Devilliers of Napoleon’s Expedition of 1798) to be sure of the general character of the building which lay beneath the rubbish-heaps.