Hatshepsut’s temple was first made known to the modern world, as we have seen, by MM. Jollois and Devilliers, two of the savants attached to Napoleon’s Expedition of 1798. The English traveller Pococke had indeed visited the site in 1737; but the thing which chiefly interested him was the abundance of mummies, and all that can be learned about the temple from his mention of it is that in his day the sanctuary was apparently accessible. “Here it seemed,” he says, “as though the mountain had been vertically hewn out by the hand of man, and the people of the place said that there had once been a passage through it into the next valley”--the Valley of the Kings. What the French explorers saw sixty years later was not a great deal more. They traced what they believed to be the bases of a series of sphinxes which had formerly formed an avenue, 42 feet wide and 437 yards long, leading up to the enclosure-wall of the temple, the remains of a wall which must have formed part of one of the terraces, what they took for the evidence of two flights of steps, leading to the higher levels of the building, the central part of the highest platform, and the rock-cut sanctuary which Pococke had seen. The rest of the temple was completely covered with heaps of sand and rubbish. The next visitor of importance was the famous Champollion, who, as was natural in the first decipherer of the hieroglyphics, was chiefly interested in the inscriptions which were visible, especially on the granite trilithon portal of the upper platform; and the great scholar at once recognised the existence in these of a puzzle which was only to be solved later. He read the cartouche of Hatshepsut as that of a king Amenenthe; but was surprised to see that all the nouns and verbs referring to this unknown king were in the feminine, and that the royal builder was addressed by Amen-Ra as “His daughter whom he loves.” He imagined the existence of a female ruler Amense, who must have been connected by marriage with an unknown Thothmes, and also with the unknown Amenenthe, and his solution of the mystery, though his names were incorrect, was, after all, not so far from the truth. Champollion found evidence in the work of the temple of one of his favourite theories--that Greek art found its origin in imitation of Egyptian work; and here, again, he was only anticipating the recognition of the fact that the colonnades of Der el-Bahri approach nearer to the style of Greek work than almost any other work in Egypt. [Illustration: 10. NORTH COLONNADE, DER EL-BAHRI; “PROTO-DORIC” COLUMNS.]