ther after she had been raised to the
throne, with a view to avoiding complications which might
have arisen in the royal family after his own death. The
inscription at Shutt-er-Ragel, which has furnished Mariette
with the hypothesis that Thutmosis I. and Thutmosis IL
reigned simultaneously, proves that the person mentioned in
it, a certain Penaiti, flourished under both these Pharaohs,
but by no means shows that these two reigned together; he
exercised the functions which he held by their authority
during their successive reigns.

[Illustration: 348.jpg PAINTING ON THE TOMB OF THE KINGS]

She governed with so firm a hand that neither Egypt nor its foreign
vassals dared to make any serious attempt to withdraw themselves from
her authority. One raid, in which several prisoners were taken, punished
a rising of the Shausu in Central Syria, while the usual expeditions
maintained order among the peoples of Ethiopia, and quenched any attempt
which they might make to revolt. When in the second year of his reign
the news was brought to Thutmosis II. that the inhabitants of the Upper
Nile had ceased to observe the conditions which his father had imposed
upon them, he "became furious as a panther," and assembling his troops
set out for war without further delay. The presence of the king with the
army filled the rebels with dismay, and a campaign of a few weeks put an
end to their attempt at rebelling.

The earlier kings of the XVIIIth dynasty had chosen for their last
resting-place a spot on the left bank of the Nile at Thebes, where the
cultivated land joined the desert, close to the pyramids built by their
predecessors. Probably, after the burial of Amenothes, the space was
fully occupied, for Thutmosis I. had to seek his burying-ground some way
up the ravine, the mouth of which was blocked by their monuments. The
Libyan chain here forms a kind of amphitheatre of vertical cliffs, which
descend to within some ninety feet of the valley, where a sloping mass
of detritus connects them by a gentle declivity with the plain.

[Illustration: 350.jpg THE AMPHITHEATRE AT DEIR EL-BAHARI, AS IT
APPEARED BEPOEE NAVILLe's EXCAVATIONS]

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch-Bey.

The great lords and the queens in the times of the Antufs and the
Usirtasens had taken possession of this spot, but their chapels were by
this period in ruins, and their tombs almost all lay buried