y
for the benefit of the student and scholar who cannot, or will not, go
to Egypt. Soon it comes to be the curator's pride to observe that
savants are hastening to his museum to make their studies. His civic
conceit is tickled by the spectacle of Egyptologists travelling long
distances to take notes in his metropolitan museum. He delights to be
able to say that the student can study Egyptology in his well-ordered
galleries as easily as he can in Egypt itself.

All this is as wrong-headed as it can be. While he is filling his museum
he does not seem to understand that he is denuding every necropolis in
Egypt. I will give one or two instances of the destruction wrought by
western museums. I them at random from my memory.

In the year 1900 the then Inspector-General of Antiquities in Upper
Egypt discovered a tomb at Thebes in which there was a beautiful relief
sculptured on one of the walls, representing Queen Tiy. This he
photographed (Plate XXVI.), and the tomb was once more buried. In 1908 I
chanced upon this monument, and proposed to open it up as a "show place"
for visitors; but alas!--the relief of the queen had disappeared, and
only a gaping hole in the wall remained. It appears that robbers had
entered the tomb at about the time of the change of inspectors; and,
realising that this relief would make a valuable exhibit for some
western museum, they had cut out of the wall as much as they could
conveniently carry away--namely, the head and upper part of the figure
of Tiy. The hieroglyphic inscription which was sculptured near the head
was carefully erased, in case it should contain some reference to the
name of the tomb from which they were taking the fragment; and over the
face some false inscriptions were scribbled in Greek characters, so as
to give the stone an unrecognisable appearance. In this condition it was
conveyed to a dealer's shop, and it now forms one of the exhibits in the
Royal Museum at Brussels. The photograph on Plate XXVII. shows the
fragment as it appears after being cleaned.

[Illustration: PL. XXVII. A Relief representing Queen Tiy, from the tomb
of Userhat, Thebes.
--BRUSSELS MUSEUM.
(See PL. xxvi.)]

[_Photo by T. Capart._

In the same museum, and in others also, there are fragments of beautiful
sculpture hacked out of the walls of the famous tomb of Khaemhat at
Thebes. In the Brit