It was true. An American had offered £12,000 for the despised statue, which no one would buy at the original sale, the same statue which the Louvre gladly acquired for £10,000. Museums will pay almost anything for fine specimens that throw some light on past ages. They will willingly fit out special expeditions to various parts of the world. Often museums cooperate in working a site, as in the case of the Temple of the Moon God at Ur, in Mesopotamia, which has been worked by the University Museum of Philadelphia and the British Museum. The Americans are indeed taking an increasing interest in digging up the past, and they have many fine discoveries to their credit, not least among them being the finding of the famous Nippur tablets in Mesopotamia, tablets which now grace the museum at Philadelphia. Theodore Davis, too, has done splendid work in the Nile Valley, and found several important tombs, among them that of Thothmes IV. Yet, since men began to dig in Egypt, no tomb has revealed so many treasures as that of Tutankhamen. The value of the contents of the tomb, with its lion-couches and chariots and alabaster statues and vases, is computed at £3,000,000. It is indeed impossible to fix the monetary worth of such things. All that can be said is that their value to science is incalculable. This is by no means the first big find to be made by Mr. Howard Carter, for years ago he revealed the tomb of Queen Hatshepsut, whose temple is one of the sights of the Valley of the Kings. The entrance to her tomb, high up on the face of the rocky hillside, led to a gallery winding round and round like a corkscrew. The builders of the tomb must have had a terrible time, for they unluckily selected a very bad spot, where the rock was soft, and so they were driven to go down and down, until they hit on a place where the rock was hard enough to serve for the burial chamber. Here the chamber was hewn out of the rock, and here it was found by Mr. Howard Carter several thousand years later, after the usual thieves had plundered it. The stench and heat were almost overpowering. Mr. Howard Carter is more familiar with Thebes than most Londoners are with London. At one time he was Inspector-General of Antiquities there, so it will be realized that his knowledge of the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings is quite exceptional, and that it was something more than good luck which led him to his greatest find of all. It is astonishing how trifles sometimes lead to big discoveries. For instance, when Professor Flinders Petrie was at Gizeh in the ’eighties, an Arab offered to sell him part of an alabaster statuette. Instantly Petrie recognized it as a very early Greek work. “Where did you get it?” he asked.