When considering the places favourable for future excavations I had named Hawara and Illahun, amongst other sites, to M. Grébaut; and he proposed to me that I should work in the Fayum province in general. The exploration of the pyramids of this district was my main object, as their arrangement, their date, and their builders were quite unknown. Hawara was not a convenient place to work at, as the village was two miles from the pyramid, and a canal lay between; I therefore determined to form a camp of workmen to live on the spot, as at Daphnae. For this purpose I needed to recruit a party from a little distance, and began my work therefore at the ancient Arsinoe or Crocodilopolis, close to Medinet el Fayum. Here I cleared the pylon of the temple, of which a few disturbed blocks remain, and found a second mention of Amenemhat II beside that already known; but his work had all been altered and rebuilt, probably by Ramessu II. Four or five different levels of building and reconstruction could be traced, and the depth of rubbish over the approach to the temple in the shallowest part of the mounds was twenty-four feet. Within the great enclosure of mud-brick wall, the site of the temple could be traced by following the bed of sand, on which the foundations had been laid; but scarcely a single stone was left. One re-used block had a figure of a king of the nineteenth dynasty, probably Ramessu II; and this leads us to date as late as Ptolemy II the temple which we can trace here. He doubtless built a large temple, as the place received much attention in his time, and was dedicated to his sister-wife Arsinoe; she was specially worshipped along with the great gods, as we know from the stele of Pithom. The only early objects found here were flint knives in the soil of the temple; these belong to the twelfth dynasty, as we know from later discoveries. [Illustration: 65. FLINT KNIFE.] A short work of a few days at Biahmu resolved the questions about the so-called pyramids there. So soon as we began to turn over the soil we found chips of sandstone colossi; the second day the gigantic nose of a colossus was found, as broad as a man’s body; then pieces of carved thrones, and a fragment [Illustration: 66. PEDESTALS OF BIAHMU.] [Illustration: 67. WALL OF COURT.]