It was after a conversation with the statue of Amen in the dusk of the sanctuary, that Queen Hatshepsut despatched her squadron to the shores of the Land of Incense.[25] Theoretically, the divine soul of the image was understood to be the only miracle worker; practically, its speech and motion were the results of a pious fraud.
Interminable avenues of sphinxes, gigantic obelisks, massive pylons, halls of a hundred columns, mysterious chambers of perpetual night--in a word, the whole Egyptian temple and its dependencies--were built by way of a hiding-place for a performing puppet, of which the wires were worked by a priest.
[21] That is, the spirits of the North, represented by On (Heliopolis), and of the South (Khonu) .-- A.B.E.
[22] At Tanis there seems to have been a close succession of obelisks and statues along the main avenue leading to the Temple, without the usual corresponding pylons.

These were ranged in pairs; _i.e._, a pair of obelisks, a pair of statues; a pair of obelisks, a pair of shrines; and then a third pair of obelisks.

See _Tanis_, Part I., by W.M.F.Petrie, published by the Egypt Exploration Fund, 1884 .-- A.B.E.
[23] This fact is recorded in the hieroglyphic inscription upon the obelisks .-- A.B.E.
[24] This celebrated tablet, preserved in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, has been frequently translated, and is the subject of a valuable treatise by the late Vicomte de Rouge.

It was considered authentic till Dr.Erman, in an admirable paper contributed to the _Zeitschrift,_ 1883, showed it to have been a forgery concocted by the priests of Khonsu during the period of the Persian rule in Egypt, or in early Ptolemaic times.

(See Maspero's _Hist.