volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

368 Queen Hatshepset and Her Ministers.
thorny one. We do not believe we are doing any of
the well-known antiquarian authorities an injustice in
saying that their visits to this country every winter
are taken largely for the sake of acquiring honestly
or dishonestly valuable antiquities for Museums they
represent. No one nation is more favoured than another
in this respect, though perhaps England and the British
Museum may be more actively represented. It is well
known that such men come to this country well provided
with funds, and that the natives at Luxor are paid to
steal or otherwise procure any coveted scientific treasure.
We are afraid the Egyptian Government cannot deal
effectively with such collectors as Dr. Budge and his
like in any direct way, but only through making the
tasks which they set the poor natives most difficult and
unpleasant to carry out. The only means of dealing with
Dr. Budge is to arouse scientific public opinion in England
against him and his methods."
This article had no effect on the friendly relations
which existed between Maspero and myself, and two
years later I was able to acquire an important collection
of funerary memorial statues of some of the high
Egyptian officials who served the great queen Hatshepset
and Thothmes III. Among these were two statues of
Senmut, the Architect of the Temple of Der al-Bahari.
We, that is, M. Legrain and myself, found them grouped
round a fine, soft crystalline limestone statue of
Hatshepset, in a brick-lined underground chapel or
chamber which lay close to the main walls of the Temple
of Karnak. Want of funds on my part delayed the
excavation of the chamber for two winters, and when
during the third winter we actually got to work, we
found that the statue of the queen, and the altar before
her, had cracked and fallen to pieces, and had become
a heap of white, pebbly dust. Maspero thought that
this was due to the admission of air into the chamber,
and told me that he had seen in some mastabah tombs
stelae made of the same kind of stone, and that they
invariably collapsed soon after the tombs were opened.
The loss of the statue of the queen in this way was very