ists,
Mertisen and his son. They carried out in the realm of art what their
king had carried out in the political realm, and to them must be
attributed the origin of the art of the Middle Kingdom which under the
XIIth Dynasty attained so high a pitch of excellence. The sculptures
of the king's temple at Der el-Bahari, then, are monuments of the
renascence of Egyptian art, after the state of decadence into which it
had fallen during the long civil wars between South and North; it is
a reviving art, struggling out of barbarism to regain perfection, and
therefore has much about it that seems archaic, stiff, and curious when
compared with later work. To the XVIIIth Dynasty Egyptian it would no
doubt have seemed hopelessly old-fashioned and even semi-barbarous, and
he had no qualms about sweeping it aside whenever it appeared in the
way of the work of his own time; but to us this very strangeness
gives additional charm and interest, and we can only be thankful that
Mertisen's work has lasted (in fragments only, it is true) to our own
day, to tell us the story of a little known chapter in the history of
ancient Egyptian art.

From this description it will have been seen that the temple is an
important monument of the Egyptian art and architecture of the Middle
Kingdom. It is the only temple of that period of which considerable
traces have been found, and on that account the study of it will be of
the greatest interest. It is the best preserved of the older temples of
Egypt, and at Thebes it is by far the most ancient building recovered.
Historically it has given us a new king of the XIth Dynasty,
Sekhahe-tep-Ra Mentuhetep, and the name of the queen of Neb-hapet-Ra
Mentuhetep, Aasheit, who seems to have been an Ethiopian, to judge from
her portrait, which has been discovered. It is interesting to note that
one of the priestesses was a negress.

The name Neb-hapet-Ra may be unfamiliar to those readers who are
acquainted with the lists of the Egyptian kings. It is a correction
of the former reading, "Neb-kheru-Ra," which is now known from these
excavations to be erroneous. Neb-hapet-Ra (or, as he used to be called,
Neb-kheru-Ra) is Mentuhetep III of Prof. Petrie's arrangement. Before
him there seem to have come the kings Mentuhetep Neb-hetep (who is also
commemorated in this temple) and Neb-taui-Ra; after him, Sekhahetep-Ra
Mentuhetep IV and Seankhkara Mentuhetep V, who were followed by an
Antef, bearing the banner or hawk-nam