But the following out of the work of Amenhotep has drawn us away from our main quest, the tracing of the story of Karnak proper. Returning to the great temple by the eastern avenue of sphinxes, we pass the girdle-wall by a pylon built by Horemheb out of the material of a temple which the unfortunate Akhenaten had reared in Thebes to his new deity the Aten. Beside the pylon stands a stele inscribed with a manifesto of Horemheb, which was designed to promote peace in the state after the religious troubles of Akhenaten’s times. The square court behind the pylon has on its east side the ruins of a small temple of Amenhotep II, and the walls of the court have reliefs of Horemheb. Another pylon of Horemheb, in a very ruinous condition, closes the court on the north side, and passing through it we are faced by one of the most ancient parts of the whole building, the pylon of Queen Hatshepsut. The pylon bears witness both to what Professor Breasted calls “the Feud of the Thutmosids,” and to the religious strifes of the XVIIIth Dynasty, for Hatshepsut’s name was erased from her reliefs by Thothmes II, and all allusions to Amen were scrupulously removed by Akhenaten, and restored by Sety I. Behind Hatshepsut’s pylon we pass a pylon of Thothmes III, her successor and enemy, and traversing a court whose walls bear inscriptions of Merenptah, the son and successor of Ramses II, in which he describes his victories over the Libyans and the Peoples of the Mediterranean, we find ourselves back at the point from which our digression started, in the central court behind the great pylon of Amenhotep III. Here was the western front of the temple in the days of Thothmes I, and here still stands the solitary remaining member of the quartette of obelisks with which this king and Thothmes III adorned the front of the pylon which now lies in ruins behind them. The obelisks of the later king are both gone--the survivor of the pair of Thothmes I is a fine shaft, 75½ feet high. Behind his pylon, and between it and a smaller one which he erected to the east, Thothmes reared a fine ceremonial hall with roof and columns of cedar wood; but his work was not permitted to endure for long. It was within this hall that the priests of Amen arranged a little piece of play-acting in which the god Amen declared his preference for Thothmes III as king, and it was perhaps this unpalatable fact which determined Queen Hatshepsut to make it the scene of a piece of vandalism which was to redound to her own glory. Anyhow, as the time for the celebration of her jubilee drew near, she sent her architect, Senmut, up to Aswan to bring down two great shafts of granite for her jubilee obelisks, and when the tremendous blocks, 97½ feet high, arrived, she stripped off the roof from part of her father’s hall and set them up there. Apart from the filial piety of such an act, the obelisks were things of which she might justly be proud.