M. Bouriant, from the first, saw that if there were anything in the new views, the cult must follow the star; and it was natural, therefore, that the three temples dedicated to the same divinity at the same place should be directed to the same star. The three temples to which I refer are the two well-known temples the lack of parallelism of which has been so often remarked, and a third much smaller one, built more recently, lying to the south-west. The amplitudes I found to be as follows:-- Amplitude S. of E. Ethiopian or Ptolemaic Temple 45° Great Temple 46½° Ancient Temple 51½° On the orientation hypothesis we were dealing with a star the S.E. amplitude of which was decreasing like that of Sirius; _it was therefore in the same quarter of the heavens_. But which star? To investigate this it was best to deal in the first instance with the orientation of the great temple, since its building date was supposed to be that most accurately known; and there is not much danger in doing this in the present case, because the king obviously had not expanded an old temple, for there it still is alongside. The king was Rameses III., the date, according to Brugsch, 1200 B.C., and the hills to which the temples are directed may be taken as 1° high. With these data we get the declination appropriate to the amplitude of the temple 40° S. Now, this was nearly the declination of the star Phact or α Columbæ in the time of Rameses III.; the orientation date is 1250 B.C. Taking this star, then, and correcting for heights of hills and refraction, we get approximately the following dates:-- B.C. Modern Temple 900 Great Temple 1250 Ancient Temple 2525 If the hills are taken as 1½° high, these dates will stand 750, 1150, and 2400. The date 700 B.C. we have already found as the probable date of the undertaking of the restoration at Denderah. It is the time of the victorious march of the Theban priests northwards from their exile at Gebel Barkal. The date 2400 B.C. lands us in the times of the great solstitial king, Usertsen I., about whom more in a subsequent chapter. Although the more ancient temple is generally ascribed to Thothmes III., traces of the work of Amen-hetep I. have been discovered. I think we have a case here where the eighteenth dynasty enlarged and embellished a shrine erected by the twelfth dynasty, precisely as the temple of Amen-Rā at Karnak has been traced back to the twelfth dynasty.