Chafra or Chephren (the fourth king of the fourth dynasty, and the builder of the second of the great pyramids); statues so well preserved, one of them especially, that they appear to be fresh from the hands of the able sculptor by whom they were carved more than 5,000 years ago.'

Art does not attain at once to that grace of line and truth of expression of which the face of Pharaoh, son of Ra, the sun-god (Chafra), offers us an example. Side by side with these statues of the king Chafra or Schaffra we may place the wooden statue of one named Ra-em-ke, remarkable for its wonderful state of preservation, and also for its beauty as a work of art, unsurpassed by any of the Greeks, as we are told by a competent judge.' This Ra-em-ke was the governor of a province during the fifth dynasty, that is to say, about a century later than king Schaffra. Lastly, the door of the great pyramid of Sakkara, now one of the most precious treasures of the Berlin Museum, formed part of a monument, which, if it were really built, as it is generally believed, under the first dynasty,2 has withstood for nearly sixty-eight centuries the destroying hand of man and of time.

'Such figures terrify the imagination. Forty-nine centuries before the birth of Christ is a great age for a work of human hands, and above all, for a true work of art. Neither India, Asia, nor Assyria have any relics of a time which approaches so nearly to the origin of humanity. But that which is really overwhelming to the mind is to find at that date, not savage tribes, but a powerfully constituted society, of which the formation must have required the lapse of centuries; a civilised people advanced in science and art, and in the knowledge of mechanics, capable of raising monuments of immense size and of indestructible solidity.'3

I shall only mention the jewels found at Thebes on the mummy of the queen Aah-hotep, mother of king Amosis,

1 M. Fr. Lenormant.

2 Under King Onennephes, 4895 B.C.

F. Lenormant, L'Antiquité à l'Exposition universelle: Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Sept. 1, 1867.

EGYPTIAN ART.

33

jewels of unequalled finish and beauty, although they date from the time when Joseph became the minister of the then reigning Pharaoh. Necklaces, bracelets, mirrors, and sacred axes of bronze, carved and gilt, a richly worked dagger, enamelled earthen vases, &c., all these works of antique art excite our surprise and admiration. Neither Greece nor Etruria,' we are told by M. Lenormant, "has produced any jewels which surpass those of the queen Aah-hotep in grandeur of conception, in elegance and purity of form, or in beauty of workmanship. But imagination is confounded at the thought that these ornaments, which reveal such a high degree of artistic culture, such wonderful manual skill in the workmen, are the product of a time of civil trouble and of war, when Egypt was painfully emerging from a long-continued struggle with a horde of barbarians (hyksos or shepherd kings) whose invasion had covered her land with ruins.'

It is time to conclude, but I cannot refrain from noticing two other objects in a wonderful state of preservation which were exposed in the collection of M. Mariette. Here again M. Lenormant shall speak for us. 'The graceful wooden spoon, which represents a young Nubian girl swimming and pushing an oval basin before her on the surface of the water, is of the time of Moses. With a little imagination we might almost believe that it lay on the table of Pharaoh's daughter. This charming little basket, with a cover woven of parti-coloured cane, and admirably preserved, which one of our own ladies might use as a work-basket, was found at Thebes in a tomb of the eleventh dynasty. It is therefore two centuries older than Abraham. Many centuries must have elapsed before such a degree of perfection was attained, and we are, indeed, far removed from the first attempts at sculpture which have been dug out of the caverns of Languedoc and Périgord. Yet there can be no doubt that Egyptian art, so perfect under the reign of Chephren and his successors, began by equally rude attempts. But from what remote age they date, or what were the names of those earlier artists, we know as

little as we know who were the sculptors whose chisel created the sphinx and the statues of the kings.'

We must add that in the remote epochs of which we are speaking, the Egyptian tongue was already formed, and possessed a written character. The greater number of our domestic animals were bred by the Egyptians, and distinct and long established breeds were known to them (greyhounds, lop-eared goats, &c.). No one can tell with certainty the number of centuries they must have passed through before attaining to so complex a civilisation. The whole history of Egypt confirms our belief in the immense antiquity of the human race.

We pass on now to compare the remains of primitive industry preserved in the diluvian gravel of the valleys or the sediment of the bone caves with the works of Egyptian art. We must study the flints and the lesson to be drawn from them.

CHAPTER II.

THE WORK OF BOUCHER DE PERTHES.

I. THE SPLINTERED FLINTS OF ABBEVILLE.

To the history of the diluvium a discovery belongs which, though insignificant in appearance, is in reality of the utmost importance from its bearing upon primitive industry: I allude to the flints, sometimes merely chipped into shape, sometimes carefully polished, found in such abundance and in such widely distant parts of the earth, from Paris to Nineveh, from China to Camboja, from Greenland to the Cape of Good Hope. Although the true nature of these flints has not been made known to us for more than forty years, the ancients knew of their existence, and, at least to those that were polished, they gave the strange names of lapides fulminis, cerauniæ gemmæ, which expressed the strange notion that they had fallen from the skies with the thunderclap, or were formed in the earth by the fire of Jove. They afterwards came to be looked upon as 'freaks of nature' (lusus natura): as early as 1734, Mahudel, and after him Mercati, ventured to say that they were the weapons of antediluvian man, but this bold assertion was received with ridicule and incredulity. Buffon in 1778, in his Epoques de la Nature,' affirmed again that the first mén began by sharpening into the form of axes these hard flints, jades, or thunder-bolts, which were believed to have fallen from the clouds and to be formed by the thunder, but which, said he, 'are merely the first monuments of the art of man in a state of nature.' This just theory passed unnoticed at the time, but all scientific men are now agreed upon its truth. But it

is to M. Boucher de Perthes that the honour belongs of having dispersed all doubts and inspired conviction. From the year 1836 to 1841 he made researches, pickaxe in hand, among the ancient tombs, the caves, the peat mosses, the diluvium of the valleys and of the bone caves, and collected thence flints of a remarkable form, more or less sharpened at the edges, presenting a number of unequal facets, and shaped like axes or knives. The origin of these chipped stones and the strata to which they rightly belong form the subject of a series of ingenious inductions, and of prophetic remarks which the event soon justified. I leave the author to speak for himself:

‘The yellowish tinge of some of these chipped stones of the diluvium was a first indication. This tinge was not that of the flint itself, but was entirely superficial, whence I concluded it was due to the ferruginous nature of the soil with which the stone had come in contact. A certain layer of the diluvium fulfilled this condition; the shade of colour was precisely that of my axes. They had been imbedded in it, but the question remained whether their presence there was the effect of a recent revolution, and later displacement, or if it dated from the formation of the bed. If the axe was in the bed from its beginning the problem was solved; the man who had made the implement was anterior to the cataclysm to which the deposit owed its formation. In this case there is no possibility for doubt; for the diluvian deposits do not, like the peat-bogs, present an elastic and permeable mass, nor a gaping chasm like the bone caves, open to every comer, and which have for centuries served as a shelter, and then as a tomb, to so many different creatures; in such a mixture of all ages, in this neutral bed, a species of caravanserai for past generations, it is impossible to characterise the different epochs.

In the diluvian formations, on the contrary, each period is sharply defined. The horizontally disposed layers, the strata differing in colour and substance, show us the history of the past in clear characters: the