The Lower Court, as far as the excavation shows us, seems to be a plain open quadrangle, abutting a raised terrace colonnade, of which one base alone of the square columns of the Terrace still exists. Above this Terrace, the back of which served as a retaining wall, is what we can only suppose to be the Upper Court, and like the lower one is a square open enclosure. On the north side of this Upper Court is a doorway (mentioned above) in the boundary wall. Behind the masonry of the Terrace are the remains of the original mud-brick scaffold for supporting the earth of the Upper Court while building the back stone wall of the Terrace itself. The masonry in some cases is good, while in others it is of the roughest kind, and in many parts the surfaces have been left undressed. Hieratic inscriptions, written in ink upon the under surfaces of the stone blocks from the walls (see Fig. 10), name the architect ‘the Second Priest of Amen, Pu-am-ra’, whose tomb (dated Thothmes III) is in the Assassif. This fixed the date of the monument to the reign of Queen Hatshepsût or Thothmes III, but to which of these two reigns, and for what use the edifice was intended, still remained unanswered for want of further data. Later, in the year 1911, we at last discovered a foundation deposit of the building (see Pl. XXX, marked Hatshepsût’s Deposit A and B), and here a small brick pillar and model tools gave the owner’s name, ‘Maat-ka-ra’ (the prenomen of Queen Hatshepsût), and on the tools themselves was the name of the building ‘_Zeser-zeseru_’. The occurrence of these names shows at once that the building formed part and parcel of the Dêr el Bahari edifice, and from its position it is clear that the building was the termination of the dromos of the famous temple--in fact its Portal or ‘Valley’-Temple--assimilating in idea the older plan of the pyramid chapels and ‘valley’-temples connected by great causeways of the pyramids at Gizeh, the tomb which takes the place of the pyramid being in this case on the opposite side of the cliff in the valley of the Tombs of the Kings. The foundation deposit, like that of the other end of the dromos found in 1910 (p. 31), was composed of two separate groups, (1) a pillar of ten mud-bricks, each stamped with the Queen’s prenomen [Illustration: hieroglyph] (see Plan, Pl. XXX, marked A); and (2) a few metres from it (see Plan, Pl. XXX, marked B) were found two model adzes in wood inscribed with the following hieroglyphic inscription:--[Illustration: hieroglyph]. These were fully four metres below the pavement level of the Upper Court of the ‘Valley’-Temple. [Illustration: Fig. 11. GRAFFITI ON STONES FROM ‘VALLEY’-TEMPLE.] Objects found during the excavation of, and belonging to this monument, were:-- 1. Lying loosely in the rubbish, a very fine specimen of a workman’s hoe (Pl. XXXII. 3).