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There is really no reason to suppose that the type of face presented by Nefret, Usertsen, and Amenemhat is not purely Egyptian. It may be seen in many a modern fellah, and the truth probably is that the sculptors have in the case of these rulers very faithfully and carefully depicted their portraits, and that their faces happen to have been of a rather hard and forbidding type.
No boats belonging to the Blacks shall in future be permitted to pass down the river by the region of Heh." The methods of Usertsen III and his opinions of the Sūdānī folk are illustrated by the following inscription which he set up at Semnah, a fort built by him at the foot of the Second Cataract. I made my boundary and went further up the river than my fathers. I added greatly to it.
It is dated in the forty-third year of the reign of Usertsen I, a king of the twelfth dynasty, about 2400 B.C. After giving the date and a list of his titles, Ameni says: "I followed my Lord when he sailed to the South to overthrow his enemies in the four countries of Nubia.
To magnify the deeds of his ancestors was neither politic nor safe, nor did it lead to favours or promotion. In no inscription of their descendants do we find the mighty deeds and great conquests of Amenemhāt III, or of Usertsen III, or of Thothmes III, praised or described, and no court scribe ever dared to draft a text stating that these were truly three of the greatest kings of Egypt.
In front of the pyramid of Usertsen (Senusret) III at one time stood the usual funerary temple, but it has been totally destroyed. By the side of the pyramid were buried some of the princesses of the royal family, in a series of tombs opening out of a subterranean gallery, and in this gallery were found the wonderful jewels of the princesses Sit-hathor and Merit, which are among the greatest treasures of the Cairo Museum. Those who have not seen them can obtain a perfect idea of their appearance from the beautiful water-colour paintings of them by M. Legrain, which are published in M. de Morgan's work on the "Fouilles
The hero is himself supposed to relate his own adventures thus: The Erpā, the Duke, the Chancellor of the King of the North, the smer uati, the judge, the Āntchmer of the marches, the King in the lands of the Nubians, the veritable royal kinsman loving him, the member of the royal bodyguard, Sanehat, saith: I am a member of the bodyguard of his lord, the servant of the King, and of the house of Neferit, the feudal chieftainess, the Erpāt princess, the highly favoured lady, the royal wife of Usertsen, whose word is truth in Khnemetast, the royal daughter of Amenemhāt, whose word is truth in Qanefer.
We have an interesting example of the custom of building a secondary tomb for royalties in these two nécropoles of Dra' Abu-'l-Negga and Abydos. Queen Teta-shera, the grandmother of Aahmes, a beautiful statuette of whom may be seen in the British Museum, had a small pyramid at Abydos, eastward of and in a line with the temple and secondary tomb of Aahmes. In 1901 Mr. Mace attempted to find the chamber, but could not. In the next year Mr. Currelly found between it and the Aahmes tomb a small chapel, containing a splendid stele, on which Aahmes commemorates his grandmother, who, he says, was buried at Thebes and had a mer-âhât at Abydos, and he records his determination to build her also a pyramid at Abydos, out of his love and veneration for her memory. It thus appeared that the pyramid to the east was simply a dummy, like Usertsen's mastabas, or the Mentuhetep pyramid at Dêr el-Bahari. Teta-shera was actually buried at Dra' Abu-'l-Negga. Her secondary pyramid, like that of Aahmes himself, was in the "holy ground" at Abydos, though it was not an imitation bâb, but a dummy pyramid of rubble. This well illustrates the whole custom of the royal primary and secondary tombs, which, as we have seen, had obtained in the case of royal personages from the time of the 1st Dynasty, when Aha had two tombs, one at Nakâda and the other at Abydos. It is probable that all the 1st Dynasty tombs at Abydos are secondary, the kings being really buried elsewhere. After their time we know for certain that Tjeser and Snefru had duplicate tombs, possibly also Unas, and certainly Usertsen (Senusret) III, Amenemhat III, and Aahmes; while Mentuhetep III and Queen Teta-shera had dummy pyramids as well as their tombs. Ramses III also had two tombs, both at Thebes. The reasons for this custom were two: first, the desire to elude plunderers, and second, the wish to give the ghost a pied-
In a line with the tomb, on the edge of the cultivation, is the funerary temple belonging to it, which was found by Mr. Randall-Maclver in 1900. Nothing remains but the bases of the fluted limestone columns and some brick walls. A headless statue of Usertsen was found.
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