ursing
the young Pharaoh Horemheb; the portrait statue of the grand dignitary
Uahabra, a good specimen of Saitic art; a column of the temple,
covered with high reliefs, which represented a procession of
bald-headed priests holding canopi in their hands; a capital, carved
with papyrus leaves and lotus flowers; and a fragment of an Egyptian
basrelief in red granite, with traces of polychromy.

In 1859 Augusto Silvestrelli, the owner of the next house, on the same
side of the Via di S. Ignazio, found five capitals of the same style
and size, which, I believe, are now in the Museo Etrusco Gregoriano.
Inasmuch as no excavation had ever been made under the pavement of the
street itself, which is public property, and as there was no reason
why that strip of public property should not contain as many works of
art as the houses about it, I asked the municipal authorities to try
the experiment, and my proposal was accepted at once.

The work began on Monday, June 11, 1883. It was difficult, because we
had to dig to a depth of twenty feet between houses of very doubtful
solidity. First to appear, at the end of the third day, was a
magnificent sphinx of black basalt, the portrait of King Amasis. It is
a masterpiece of the Saitic school, perfected even in the smallest
details, and still more impressive for its historical connection with
the conquest of Egypt by Cambyses.

[Illustration: The Sphinx of Amasis.]

The cartouches bearing the king's name appear to have been purposely
erased, though not so completely as to render the name illegible. The
nose, likewise, and the _uraeus_, the symbol of royalty, were hammered
away at the same time. The explanation of these facts is given by
Herodotos. When Cambyses conquered Sais, Amasis had just been buried.
The conqueror caused the body to be dragged out of the royal tomb,
then flogged and otherwise insulted, and finally burnt, the maximum of
profanation, from an Egyptian point of view. His name was erased from
the monuments which bore it, as a natural consequence of the _memoriae
damnatio_. This sphinx is the surviving testimonial of the eventful
catastrophe. When, six or seven centuries later, a Roman governor of
Egypt, or a Roman merchant from the same province, singled out this
work of art, to be shipped to Rome as a votive offering for the Temple
of Isis, ignorant of the historical value of its mutilations, he had
the nose and the _uraeus_ carefully restored. Now both are gone agai