The reason for the existence of this extraordinary dump of discarded sculpture, whose richness Maspero’s vivacious sentences do not in the least exaggerate, and which gave us, to mention only two examples, the masterly pink granite head of Senusert III, one of the most brilliant examples of XIIth Dynasty sculpture, and the schist Thothmes III, equally one of the finest examples of the art of the New Empire, seems to have been this. The Ptolemies, the presence of whose coins in the pit sufficiently dates it, did a great deal of building at Karnak, and in the course of their cleaning up of the places where they worked, they, no doubt, came on an infinity of out-of-date _ex voto_ statues, some of them broken, some of them whole, but all rather a nuisance and obstruction, as the persons with whom they were associated had long since ceased to be of importance. What was to be done with them? They could not simply be thrown out as rubbish, for they had been dedicated to the god, and were therefore sacred; and they could not be allowed to stand littering up the courts which the Ptolemies were busily tidying. Accordingly the great pit was dug within the sacred enclosure, and Senusert, Thothmes, Senmut, and hundreds of other old Egyptian notables were consigned to its muddy depths, thence to be resurrected, more than two thousand years later, by their degenerate descendants, who baled out the water from the pit with old petroleum cans, and hoisted Pharaoh, High-priest or Statesman, unceremoniously out of his dark resting-place with lever and tackle. It has been a fortunate chance for us, for Egyptian portrait-sculpture might stake its reputation on the two pieces which I have mentioned, and the pit has yielded scores almost as good.