Each of these sovereigns, whether his contribution to any work had been great or small, took care to inscribe his own name upon it, and thus to call upon both posterity and his own contemporaries to bear witness to his piety. The temple as we see it at Karnak and Luxor is the collective and successive work of many generations. Such, too, was the character of the great buildings at Memphis which were consecrated to Ptah and Neith. But on the left bank of the Nile, and in the neighbourhood of the Theban necropolis, we find a group of temples whose physiognomy is peculiar to themselves. Nothing exactly like them is to be found elsewhere;[241] and they all belong to one period, that of the three great Theban dynasties, the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth.[242] "These temples are monuments raised by the kings themselves to their own glory. They are not, like the temples at Karnak and Luxor, the accumulated results of several generations. Each temple was begun and finished by the king who planned it, so far at least as construction was concerned. In those cases where the decoration was left incomplete at the death of the royal builder, his successor finished it in his name. In these decorations the founder of the temple was represented either worshipping the gods, or in the eventful moments of his military career, or in his great hunts; and thus, while yet alive, he laid the foundations of an edifice destined to carry the memory of his glory and piety down to the latest posterity."[243] [241] EBERS, indeed, found something of the same kind in the temple of Abydos. He found there a cenotaph consecrated to his own memory by Seti I. This cenotaph was near the tomb of Osiris, while the king himself was buried in the Theban necropolis. (_Ægypten_, pp. 234, 235.) [242] The beautiful little temple of Dayr-el-Medinet, begun by Ptolemy Philopator and finished by his successors, especially by Physco, has often been considered a funerary monument. It is alleged that the situation of the temple in the necropolis, and the nature of the subjects represented in the interior, particularly in the Western Chamber, prove that it was so. If we accept this opinion, we must look upon the temple as a mere freak of fancy, suggested to Ptolemy Philopator by a journey to Thebes. The Greek prince was interred far from it, and it could have formed no part of his tomb. [243] MARIETTE, _Deir-el-Bahari_, § 1. (Atlas, folio, Leipsic, 1877, with 40 pages letterpress, 4to.) [Illustration: FIG. 173.--Rameses III. hunting; from Medinet-Abou.]