ked only by a few almost imperceptible inequalities
in the soil, some crumbling lengths of walls, and here and there some
scattered blocks of limestone, containing a few lines of mutilated
inscriptions which can with difficulty be deciphered; the obelisk has
survived even the destruction of the ruins, and to all who understand
its language it still speaks of the Pharaoh who erected it.

The undertaking and successful completion of so many great structures
had necessitated a renewal of the working of the ancient quarries, and
the opening of fresh ones. Amenemhait I. sent Antuf, a great dignitary,
chief of the prophets of Minu and prince of Koptos, to the valley
of Rohanu, to seek out fine granite for making the royal sarcophagi.
Amenemhait III. had, in the XLIIIrd year of his reign, been present at
the opening of several fine veins of white limestone in the quarries of
Turah, which probably furnished material for the buildings proceeding at
Heliopolis and Memphis. Thebes had also its share of both limestone and
granite, and Amon, whose sanctuary up to this time had only attained
the modest proportions suited to a provincial god, at last possessed a
temple which raised him to the rank of the highest feudal divinities.
Amon's career had begun under difficulties: he had been merely a
vassal-god of Montu, lord of Hermonthis (the Aunu of the south), who
had granted to him the ownership of the village of Karnak only. The
unforeseen good fortune of the Antufs was the occasion of his emerging
from his obscurity: he did not dethrone Montu, but shared with him the
homage of all the neighbouring villages--Luxor, Medamut, Bayadiyeh; and,
on the other side of the Nile, Gurneh and Medinet-Habu. The accession of
the XIIth dynasty completed his triumph, and made him the most powerful
authority in Southern Egypt. He was an earth-god, a form of Minu who
reigned at Koptos, at Akhmim and in the desert, but he soon became
allied to the sun, and from thenceforth he assumed the name of Amon-Ra.
The title of "suton nutiru" which he added to it would alone have
sufficed to prove the comparatively recent origin of his notoriety; as
the latest arrival among the great gods, he employed, to express his
sovereignty, this word "suton," king, which had designated the rulers
of the valley ever since the union of the two Egypts under the shadowy
Menes. Reigning at first alone, he became associated by marriage with a
vague indefinite goddess, called Maut,