Sais was under the protection of the goddess Neit, the unbegotten mother of the sun. When the Greeks first came there, they identified the goddess with their own Athêna, led thereto by the similarity of the names. But this identification led to further results. As Athêna was the patron goddess of Athens, so it was supposed that there was a special connection between Sais and Athens. While Athêna was fabled to have come from Libya, Kekrops, the mythic founder of Athens, was transformed into an Egyptian of Sais. It was from a priest of Sais, moreover, that Solon, the Athenian legislator, learned the wisdom of the Egyptians. The squalid village of Sa el-Hagar, “Sais of the stone,” is the modern representative of the capital of Psammetikhos. In these days of railways it is difficult of access, as there is no station in its neighbourhood. In the earlier part of the century, however, when the traveller had to go from Alexandria to Cairo in a dahabîyeh, he was compelled to pass it, and it was consequently well-known to the tourist. But little is left of the populous city and its stately monuments except mounds of disintegrated brick, a large enclosure surrounded by a crude brick wall seventy feet thick, and the sacred lake. The lake, however, is sacred no longer; shrunken in size and choked with rubbish, it is a stagnant pool in the winter, and an expanse of half-dried mud in the late spring. It is situated within the great wall, which is that of the _temenos_ of Neit. Stone is valuable in the Delta, and hardly a fragment of granite or limestone survives from all the buildings and colossal monuments that Herodotos saw. But in 1891 a great number of bronze figures of Neit, some of them inlaid with silver, were found there by the _fellahin_. They are of the careful and finished workmanship that marks the age of the twenty-sixth dynasty, and on one of the largest of them is a two-fold inscription in Egyptian hieroglyphs and the letters and language of the Karians. It was dedicated to the goddess of Sais in the reign of Psammetikhos by a son of a Karian mother and an Egyptian father who bore both an Egyptian and a Karian name. It is an interesting proof of the readiness of some at least among the natives of Sais to mingle with the foreigner, and it shows further that the Karian mercenaries, like the Greeks, brought their wives and daughters along with them.