THE HELIX OF HISTORY 31 



great temple gioup built by the Ramesside rulers. To see 

 the difference between the artistic levels in maturity and in 

 the decline, one has only to compare Hatshepsut's temple at 

 Deir el Bahri with the great hall at Karnak built three hun- 

 dred years later. 



To determine the duration of these periods, Petrie selects 

 the best-defined position in each cycle of the development of 

 art as the close of the archaic age in sculpture. This is best 

 defined, of course, because of the rapid improvement that is 

 generally noted at this stage; and, by means of it, there is 

 possible some appreciation of the period between the '^vaves 

 of art in successive cycles. Petrie believes that the average 

 period is about thirteen hundred years. It must be remem- 

 bered, however, that Petrie's early chronology is not accepted 

 by other scholars and that it is generally agreed that his dates 

 before 1600 b.c. need correction. If we use the chronology 

 generally accepted now, Petrie's chart gives five complete 

 periods in four thousand years, an average of eight hundred 

 years per cycle.* 



By making judgments for subjects other than sculpture, 

 Petrie found that painting and literature tended to reach 

 their climax later than sculpture. He draws a chart in which 

 the different periods are shown as if they w^ere on the surface 

 of a cylinder, each period ending, of course, at the date at 

 which the next period began. In this chart, the points that 

 he has marked for sculpture, painting, literature, mechanics, 

 and wealth tend to diverge, each of them coming later as 

 the cycles progress. If this chart is redrawn with the early 

 chronology changed to accord with that accepted by J. H. 

 Breasted and other modern scholars— 3000 b.c. as the beorin- 



o 



ning of the Third Dynasty and 1800 B.C. as the end of the 

 T^velfth Dynasty— it becomes that sho^vn in Figure 1. Inter- 

 polating the new dates derived from those selected by Petrie 

 for the end of the archaic style in sculpture in each cycle, we 

 get the zigzag line shown. It is no longer possible to draw a 



* But the modified chart shown in Figure 2, p. 34, gives a duration 

 of five hundred years per cycle. 



