It stood in the part of the city known
as Asheru. This building was cleared in 1895 at the expense and under
the supervision of two English ladies, Miss Benson and Miss Gourlay.
[Illustration: 374.jpg THE NILE-BANK AT LUXOR]
With A Dahabiya And A Steamer Of The Anglo-American Nile
Company.
The temple had always been remarkable on account of the prodigious
number of seated figures of the lioness-headed goddess Sekhemet, or
Pakhet, which it contains, dedicated by Amenhetep III and Sheshenk I;
most of those in the British Museum were brought from this temple.
The excavators found many more of them, and also some very interesting
portrait-statues of the late period which had been dedicated there.
The most important of these was the head and shoulders of a statue of
Mentuemhat, governor of Thebes at the time of the sack of the city by
Ashur-bani-pal of Assyria in 668 B.C. In Miss Benson's interesting book,
_The Temple of Mut in Asher_, it is suggested, on the authority of Prof.
Petrie, that his facial type is Cypriote, but this speculation is a
dangerous one, as is also the similar speculation that the wonderful
portrait-head of an old man found by Miss Benson [* Plate vii of her
book.] is of Philistine type. We have only to look at the faces of
elderly Egyptians to-day to see that the types presented by Mentuemhat
and Miss Benson's "Philistine" need be nothing but pure Egyptian.
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