208

EXCAVATIONS AT DEIR EL BAHRI

engraved with weird and fearsome monsters such as inhabited the
gloomy and dangerous regions of the nether world. Two such wands
in the Metropolitan Museum10 are inscribed: “Protection by Night
and Protection by Day”—strange attribute for an ordinary bone
clapper. In fact, these are obviously something more than clappers,
but our modern habit of calling such objects “magic wands” does not
get us to a real explanation. They remain one of the puzzles left us by
the ancient Egyptian.
Late that winter Baraize decided to rebuild the two lower porches
of the temple, and had to expose their back walls down to the bedrock
under the middle terrace. More than half of this terrace, we had
already discovered was built and filled over part of the court of Neb-
hepet-Ref’s earlier temple. The wall of this earlier court could be seen
disappearing under the Hat-shepsut structure beneath the southwest
corner and then reappearing diagonally across the court at the north-
east corner, eighty-nine meters away, and what whetted our interest
was that exactly where it went under the later terrace and again
where it came out there was an Eleventh Dynasty tomb beside it. If
there were other tombs between they would have been undisturbed
for thirty-five hundred years, and the opportunity to look for them
was given us by the rebuilding of the temple porches.
We undertook the excavation behind the north porch and easily
picked up the buried Eleventh Dynasty wall deep under the terrace
(pl. 3). We then turned the men west and methodically cut a vast
trench eight meters deep right across Hat-shepsut’s temple—but it
led us to no tombs. It is typical of the contrariness of things archaeo-
logical that the only tombs beside that wall happened to have been
the two which had tempted us, exactly at the points where Hat-
shepsut’s temple crossed it. However, you cannot dig in the Theban
necropolis without learning something.
In the first place, in our trench we found further traces of the brick
chapel which Amen-hotpe I and his mother, Neferet-Iry, had built
about 1550 b.c. and which Sen-Mut had razed when he built the
temple for Hat-shepsut.11 The remains of Amen-hotpe’s temple were
meager but they were sufficient, with the vestiges which we had un-
earthed before, to establish accurately its location and size. And the
little structure was not without interest in the history of Deir el
Bahri. There had been an avenue of free-standing sandstone Osiride
10 The first referred to in the last footnote, and another from the Theodore M. Davis
Collection, M.M.A. 30.8.218.
11 See above, page 88.