20 EDOUAED NAVILLE. 



Rameses, and his face was engraved on ail the palm-capital 

 columns, where it was afterwards transformed to Mahes. 

 Nevertheless, Bast appears sometimes in the inscriptions of 

 Eameses II., for instance, on a great tablet, of which we 

 found only a part, and which is a dialogue between the king 

 and the goddess, who makes his eulogy in words like the fol- 

 lowing : " I take in my hand the timbrel, and I celebrate thy 

 coming forth, for thou hast multiplied the sacred things 

 millions of times." There is no question that Rameses II. 

 worked much in Bubastis, but in the way which best illus- 

 trates his personal character and the tendency of all his acts. 

 An extraordinary vanity and self-conceit, a violent desire to 

 dazzle his contemporaries by his display, and posterity by the 

 immense number of constructions bearing his name, seems to 

 have been the ruling power of his conduct during his long 

 reign. In the second hall of Bubastis there are many colossal 

 architraves where his cartouche is engraved in letters several 

 feet high, but there is not one of them where an older inscrip- 

 tion has not been cut out sometimes the old signs are still 

 visible. In one instance, very likely because something con- 

 cealed the end of the stone, the workman did not take the 

 trouble to erase completely, and at the end of the cartouche of 

 Rameses II. appear the first letters of the name of User- 

 tesen III. of the Twelfth dynasty. 



There is no doubt that Bubastis was a place for which 

 Rameses felt a special liking ; he was anxious that the whole 

 temple should appear as built by himself, from the great 

 statues of Apepi at the entrance to the columns of the hypo- 

 style hall at the western side. I do not believe that there is 

 any other temple with so many statues bearing the name of 

 Rameses II. as Bubastis. Undoubtedly they have not all 

 been made for him ; two of the finest which we discovered, 

 both in black granite, were certainly not his portrait. One of 

 them, which is complete, has been given to the Museum of 

 Geneva ; the head of the other, a fine piece of art, has gone to 

 Sydney; none of them has any likeness to the well-known type 

 of Rameses ; they are kings of the Thirteenth or Fourteenth 

 dynasty. Besides those statues, there were a great number in 

 red granite, of various proportions, and standing in different 

 parts of the building, which have merely an ornamental pur- 

 pose ; we are not to look for portraits on any of them. I 

 spoke before of the four statues with crisp hair, one of which 

 is in the British Museum. Another, now at Boulak, wears 

 a fine head-dress called the atef, two feathers resting on the 

 horns of a ram. There were also groups representing the 

 king sitting with one or two gods ; groups of that kind were 



