When the first Ptolemies decided at the beginning of the third century B.C. to restore the Theban temple of Amon, they found it encumbered with _ex-votos_. Everywhere, in the halls, the corridors, the court-yards, there were stelæ, stone statues, little wooden or bronze figures, sacred or royal insignia, heaped up one on the other, and in such quantities that there was no space for new ones. It was a legacy of extinct Dynasties or of noble families who had died out, to whom the Pharaohs had granted the privilege of consecrating their image in the house of the god, and to sell or destroy any of them would have been to commit sacrilege.[46] They were dealt with according to the custom of the contemporary peoples: a vast pit was dug between the seventh pylon and the hypostyle hall, and then they were buried pell-mell in holy ground. Twenty centuries later, in 1883, hastily made soundings revealed the richness of the site to me, but, lacking money, I could not venture to undertake anything. It was not until 1901, when the regular progress of clearing away brought the workmen to the spot, that I advised M. Legrain to dig more deeply than usual, so that nothing which was hidden beneath the earth might escape observation. The excavations yielded just what I had foreseen, royal colossi in granite, limestone, sandstone which were restored to their ancient places along the pylon; a little below came fragments of a fine limestone building of Amenôthes I that Thoutmôsis III had used for banking up when he enlarged the temple; and at the very bottom, at a depth of over six, twelve, fourteen yards, what none of us had thought of, an intact _favissa_ in which hundreds of statues and small objects awaited in the mud the hour of their deliverance.