Passing on up the Nile Valley, Lepsius paid special attention to the tombs of the Middle Kingdom with their valuable pictures of Egyptian life a millennium later than the pyramid period, and also visited the site which has since become so famous as Tell el-Amarna. Not content with carrying his researches to the limit of the Second Cataract, where Rosellini had stopped, he pressed on through Nubia as far as Napata and Meroë, the former seats of that Ethiopian extension of Egyptian civilisation which gave to Egypt its ill-starred XXVth Dynasty, while on his return journey he visited the Sinai Peninsula, where he discovered and published the very valuable inscriptions left by the Egyptian expeditions which for many centuries were sent to work the copper mines at the Wady Maghareh and Serabit el-Khadem. He thus revealed to us the first chapter of the wonderful story of Egyptian exploring and commercial activity, whose subsequent disclosures have at last almost succeeded in destroying the time-honoured myth which represented the ancient Egyptians as a cloistered nation, the Chinese of the Near East. The _Denkmäler aus Ægypten und Æthiopien_, published from 1849 to 1858 gave to the world the results of the wonderfully fruitful work of Lepsius, and has scarcely yet been altogether superseded as a source of illustration of the manners and culture of the ancient Egyptians. “In the main,” says Dr. Macalister, “the statement may stand, that Lepsius exhausted the general topographical study of the country.” Subsequent researches have done no more than to add filling in to the broad outlines which he drew with such care and certainty.