Naville, Edouard: Bubastis: (1887 - 1889) (London, 1891)

16

BUBASTIS.

thick and roughly marked. These character-
istics remind us not only of works of the twelfth
dynasty, but also of statues several of which
have been preserved, bearing the name of
Rameses II. I shall mention only two. One
is at Boston, and was discovered by Mr. Petrie at
Nebesheh ; the other comes from Bubastis, and
is now in the museum of Geneva (pi. xiv.).4 It
is evident that this last one is not Rameses II.;
the type of the face is quite different from the
Ramessides, and in addition to other erasures,
the sides of the throne have been diminished
in order to engrave the name of the king.
The head-dress is the same as on the Sebekhotep
of the Louvre. The statue is in a remarkable
state of preservation, there is only a slight
piece of the nose which is wanting. It was
broken in two at the waist. The base
appeared already in my first excavations in
1887; but it was sunk deep in water, and I
left it until I should have discovered the upper
part. The inundation of the following sum-
mer carried off the earth which covered the
head; it had fallen forward close to the base,
with the face in the soil. When it was raised
and turned, the colours were seen quite fresh.
The stripes of the diadem were painted alter-
nately blue and yellow, and there were traces of
red on the face. The colours soon vanished
after they had been exposed to the air two or
three days ; but we had here a good example
of the use which the Egyptians made of poly-
chromy. They painted their statues even
when they were made of black granite.

Thus I should attribute the Rameses of
Geneva to a king of the thirteenth dynasty.
The statue has a curious peculiarity. Seen
from the side, in profile, the head seems dispro-
portionate, and much too large for the torso,
while the chest is somewhat hollow. This
singularity may be seen also in a statue

4 Another monument of the same kind is the Barneses of
the Louvre, vid. Rouge, Notice des monuments, p. 19 and
20.

which has the greatest likeness to the Rameses
of Geneva ; it is at the British Museum, where
it has been labelled Amenophis III., though it
bears no hieroglyphical name.

If the kings of the thirteenth dynasty have
been so powerful, and if they have carried their
conquests so far as Upper Nubia, it is astonish-
ing that they left so few monuments, and that
their cartouches occur much more seldom than
those of the twelfth. The reason of it seems
to me that the thirteenth dynasty has been the
object of a peculiar malevolence from the
kings of the nineteenth. For a cause which
we do not know, neither Seti I. nor his son
Rameses considered the Sebekhoteps as legiti-
mate kings, and they did not admit them in the
royal lists which were engraved at Abydos and
Sakkarah, no more than the Hyksos. The
eighteenth dynast}*, and especially Thothmes
III., did not share the same feeling, as he
mentions them in his list of Karnak. The
hatred of Rameses and his family against the
thirteenth dynasty may explain why its monu-
ments are so scarce. From the destruction
practised by the Ramessides, we possess only
what has been saved either because the island of
Argo was very far off, or because the in-
scription was hidden in a wall as in Bubastis,
or because the old name had been thoroughly ex-
punged. We must attribute to a fortunate
neglect the good preservation of the statues of
the Louvre and of Tanis. The result is that
the thirteenth dynasty, which has played an
important part in the history of Egypt, is among
the least known. But we can hope to derive
more information about it from careful re-
searches among the materials with which the
later temples were built, especially those of the
nineteenth dynasty.

THE HYKSOS.
Josephus, quoting Manetho, gives the following
version of the invasion of the Shepherds and of