156 EDOUARD 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 
Rameses 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 i in words like the fol- 
lowing : “<T 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 IJ. 
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. Inthe 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 hkeness 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 or namental pur- 
pose; we are not to look for portraits on any of them. If 
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 
