Rhampsinitos represents a real Egyptian king. He is Ramses III. of the twentieth dynasty, the last of the conquering Pharaohs, and the builder of Medînet Habu at Thebes. But Herodotos was never at Thebes, and had consequently never heard of the superb temple and palace Ramses had built there. All that he knows of the architectural works of the Pharaoh are the insignificant additions he made to the temple of Memphis. Of the real Pharaoh he is equally ignorant. In place of the vanquisher of the hordes of the north, the monarch who annihilated the invaders from the Ægean and captured or sunk their ships, the conqueror who carried his arms into Palestine and Syria, we have the hero of a folk-tale. Rhampsinitos and his treasury have become the subject of the story of the master-thief, a story which in various forms is found all over the world, and perhaps goes back to the infancy of mankind. Why this story should have been attached to Ramses III. it is just as impossible for us to know as it is to understand why the name of Neit, the goddess of Sais and the twenty-sixth dynasty, should have been combined with that of the Theban Pharaoh of the twentieth. Rhampsinitos, Ramessu-n-Neit or “Ramses of Neit,” indicates the period in which alone the name could have been formed. It must have been the invention of the Karian dragomen who came into existence under the Saitic dynasty. Ramses III. was, however, as we learn from the great Harris papyrus, one of the wealthiest of Egyptian princes. The gifts he made to the temples of the gods, more especially to that of Amon of Thebes, are almost fabulous in amount. His trading ships brought him the wares of the south and north; and the gold-mines of the eastern desert, as well as the copper and malachite mines of the province of Mafkat, the Sinaitic Peninsula of our modern maps, were actively worked in his reign. The chambers of one of his treasuries still exist at Medînet Habu, and we can still see depicted on their walls the vases of precious metal which he deposited in them.