Excavation, which has done so much for our knowledge of Der el-Bahri, has taught us that the originality of the XVIIIth Dynasty architect was not quite so absolute as was once imagined, and that he owed at least the idea of colonnaded terraces to the great man of the XIth Dynasty, Mertisen or another, who designed the pyramid-temple, “Glorious are the seats of King Mentuhotep Neb-hepet-Ra,” for his royal master. But Senmut was one of those great men who, though they take their blessings where they find them, can never be accused of plagiarism, because they give back to the world the original idea transfigured and glorified. He has made the idea of the terraced courts and colonnades his own, while avoiding the heavy central block, which, with its somewhat paltry pyramid (if this was ever completed), must have been a contradiction to the whole conception of the rest of the building; and his spacious courts, with their almost Greek grace of surrounding colonnade, seem touched with a spirit which is lacking in the older work. Mr. Robert Hichens has told us how “after the terrific masculinity of Medinet-Abu, after the great freedom of the Ramesseum, and the grandeur of its colossus, the temple at Deir-el-Bahari came upon him like a delicate woman, perfumed and arranged, clothed in a creation of white and blue and orange, standing--ever so knowingly--against a background of orange and pink, of red and of brown-red, a smiling coquette of the mountain”; and though his idea is quite too fantastically elaborated (for the idea of conscious striving after prettiness is the last thing one could think of in connection with Der el-Bahri), yet the idea of femininity does occur to the mind when the temple is compared with other Egyptian work. Hatshepsut had not much of the weak woman about her, to all appearance, and Senmut, if his statues are any clue to the man, was as rough-hewn and masculine a piece of granite as one might encounter; but between them they managed to rear a temple which stands alone in Egypt for the feminine quality of grace. So now we may turn to the story of how this most graceful of Egyptian temples, unique in its grace if not in its main idea, and unique also in that it is the only temple in Egypt which came into being wholly at the bidding of a woman, was rescued from the accumulations of two and a half millenniums of neglect and the ravages of religious fanaticism.