It may be questioned, however, whether all these precautions did not rather tend to defeat their own end, and whether Pharaoh might not have slumbered in greater security had his tomb been less gorgeous and less richly equipped than he could hope to do when his tomb was a wonder of the world, and when all men knew that wealth untold was stored within its dark depths. At all events we know that from the earliest days of the Egyptian kingdom to the latest the kings were few indeed whose rest was not rudely broken by the sacrilegious hands of robbers. The fate of King Sebek-em-saf, already described, is typical of that of the royal tombs in general. For five thousand years human greed has proved more powerful than human piety or even than human superstition. To-day, the professional tomb-robber of native birth, though his activities are as skilfully conducted as ever, finds a rival in the scientific explorer, whose disturbance of the rest of the royal dead, though there are still many who object to the work as a profanation of what all men should regard as sacred, is at least conducted with as much reverence as possible, and in the interests not of individual greed of gain, but of the general sum of knowledge of the human race. In this respect the situation should be clearly understood. It is not a question of whether the dead kings of ancient Egypt shall or shall not be allowed to rest in peace in their tombs. That question has been settled, and settled in the negative, for many centuries by the persistent habit of the Egyptians themselves. Robbed the tombs of the Pharaohs (such of them as still remain undisturbed) will inevitably be. That is as sure as death itself. The only question is whether the robbery shall be conducted by ignorant fellahin for the sake of private gain, and in such a fashion that the whole of the results shall be scattered among a score of private collections, and all their historic value forever lost, or whether it shall be conducted in orderly and scientific fashion, the finds duly catalogued in their true order, and gathered together in one great assemblage in a place where they can be studied in their true relation to one another, and to other finds of similar character. There can be no doubt as to which of these methods is preferable. To deny to the man of science the opportunity of investigating the history, the art, and the life of the past as revealed in the treasures of the royal tombs is simply to make it certain that, without securing in the least the sanctity of the tombs, all the knowledge which might have been drawn from them shall be lost forever to the world. This is the sufficient justification of those excavations which, in spite of all the interest created by their revelations, have so often created also a feeling of repugnance and protest.