is name was mighty in the land of Kush,
his battle-cry was in their dwelling-places." Except for a semi-military
expedition which was dispatched to the land of Punt, these are the only
recorded foreign activities of the King; but that he had spent much
time in the organisation and improvement of the army is shown by the
fact that three years after his death the Egyptian soldiers were
swarming over the Lebanon and hammering at the doors of the cities of
Jezreel.

Had he lived for another few years he might have been famous as a
conqueror as well as an administrator, though old age might retard and
tired bones refuse their office. As it is, however, his name is written
sufficiently large in the book of the world's great men; and when he
died, about B.C. 1315, after a reign of some thirty-five years, he had
done more for Egypt than had almost any other Pharaoh. He found the
country in the wildest disorder, and he left it the master of itself,
and ready to become once more the master of the empire which Akhnaton's
doctrine of Peace and Goodwill had lost. Under his direction the purged
worship of the old gods, which for him meant but the maintenance of some
time-proved customs, had gained the mastery over the chimerical worship
of Aton; without force or violence he had substituted the practical for
the visionary; and to Amon and Order his grateful subjects were able to
cry, "The sun of him who knew thee not has set, but he who knows thee
shines; the sanctuary of him who assailed thee is overwhelmed in
darkness, but the whole earth is now in light."

The tomb of this great Pharaoh was cut in the rocks on the west side of
the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings, not far from the resting-place of
Amenhotep II. In the days of the later Ramesside kings the
tomb-plunderers entered the sepulchre, pulled the embalmed body of the
king to pieces in the search for hidden jewels, scattered the bones of
the three members of his family who were buried with him, and stole
almost everything of value which they found. There must have been other
robberies after this, and finally the Government inspectors of about
B.C. 1100 entered the tomb, and, seeing its condition, closed its mouth
with a compact mass of stones. The torrents of rain which sometimes fall
in winter in Egypt percolated through this filling, and left it
congealed and difficult to cut through; and on the top of this hard mass
tons of rubbish were tossed from other excavations, thu