14 
TANIS. 
of the hall, thus leaving room for a court fairly 
proportionate to the statue. (For the details of 
the colossus, see § 28.) 
The present pylon, as 1 have said, was entirely 
built by Sheshonk III. (pi. xv. 1); and the account 
of the sculptures will be given further on in 
chronological order (in the second memoir), 
but we may here note its construction. It 
appears to have been built largely out of the frag¬ 
ments of the colossus of Ramessu, supplemented 
with various other blocks appropriated from the 
earlier buildings, such as an architrave, a sand¬ 
stone obelisk, and a large historical stele. The 
heap of fallen blocks lies so much to the southern 
side, that during some weeks I was cutting through 
the ponderous ruins so as to ascertain their 
nature. All the blocks I found to lie on the 
surface of the ground, or what was the surface in 
early Arab times, and beneath them is a bed of 
accumulated mud and dust, derived from the 
disintegration of the great wall, such as has also 
covered nearly all the temple area. No outer 
sides of the walls of the pylon are to be found, 
and hence the present granite walls of the passage 
were either backed with limestone, or else they 
cased over the ends of the mud-brick enclosure 
wall of the temple. In either case it was the de¬ 
struction of the backing of the granite, by plun¬ 
derers, or by weather, that exposed the granite 
faces of the passage to ruin; and it was probably 
as late as Arab times that the walls finally fell 
into their present dilapidation. The pavement" 
of the pylon, which stretches out about twenty- 
seven feet in front of it, is composed of earlier 
blocks, including pieces of the great granite 
colossus, propped up with the stones of Ra¬ 
messu II.; thus the whole of the Ramessida 
pylon must have been stripped away before 
Sheshonk III. The present pavement is twenty- 
three feet above low Nile, or seven feet above 
the limestone pavement nearer the river. 
19. Beyond the pylon, from about fifty to a 
hundred and fifty feet further in, stood an avenue of 
columns, of which but few remain. These were 
monoliths, the shaft and capital being all in one 
piece. They were original works of Ramessu II.; 
and some later king has begun to appropriate 
them by cutting out the mes-s-su from the second 
cartouche. As no later king had the name Ra-user- 
ma sotep-en-ra excepting Sheshonk III., it was pro¬ 
bably that king who altered these columns ; if so, 
the Ra in the second cartouche would need to be 
altered to Bast. In the plan may be seen one 
perfect column (39), a base (41), and the column 
belonging to it (42) with the capital broken off, 
and half of another column (43), of which the 
capital is also attached. The whole monoliths 
were thirty-five and a half, and thirty-six, feet 
high, and the bases three feet one inch high. 
At the end of this hall stood a pair of obelisks 
(43, 47) the bases of which (45, 46) are lying 
not far from their original places. The cele¬ 
brated trilingual decree of San was found at the 
spot marked (48). It had been known to a 
Maltese dealer for some time before the visit 
of Lepsius, and offered by description to more 
than one person: he had moved it and left 
it partly uncovered, and it is said that he sat 
on it and refused to move until paid to do 
BO by Lepsius; also that Lepsius was intending 
to move it, and the government hearing of this 
sent down a party of soldiers to seize it. How¬ 
ever these things may be, I only repeat what 
I was told, as Herodotus says. Finding the 
tablet at this spot does not at all show that 
Ptolemy III. placed it there; especially as the 
level of it is at the stratum of the Roman period, 
and not a trace of other monuments was found 
in the trenches that I cut on each side of the spot. 
It seems probable that this tablet was placed in the 
Ptolemaic temple, of which I found the pavement 
and a large inscribed block outside the great wall 
of the older temple on the south. It is certain 
that considerable works were carried on in later 
times at San about the site of the tablet, as the 
great well and staircase (Plan, 40) show us, and the 
tablet was probably carried off from the temple for 
