§77. EGYPTIAN AND GREEK INVENTIONS. 299 



smile at the idea of the flutes of the Ionic representing the 

 drapery of the female figure, of which the column itself (more 

 slender than the " masculine Doric") was said to be a symbol ; 

 and at the many other fanciful tales, ingeniously devised, 

 to prove originality. And while we admire the story of the 

 tile and basket, with the acanthus leaf, put forth to account 

 for the invention of the Corinthian capital, we cease to admit its 

 truth on finding how its oldest forms, which occur on the 

 columns of the tomb called the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae, 

 and at the tower of Andronicus at Athens, were simjily the 

 basket capital of Egypt. And the pretended origin of portrai- 

 ture, or modelling in relief, from the lover's face on the wall 

 copied by the daughter of Dibutades of Sicyon, is only another 

 pretty story. The capital we know as the Corinthian should 

 properly be called the Greek Composite, composed as it is of 

 the original basket and the Ionic volutes ; and in it we see 

 how admirably the tasteful Greeks combined the volutes, and 

 how badly the Romans applied them in their ponderous and 

 ill-proportioned Composite order. We no longer believe, with 

 Pliny, and some modern Hellenists, that many of the earliest 

 inventions were of Greek origin ; that men under fabulous 

 names devised them in Greece ages after they had been com- 

 mon in older countries ; or that various scientific discoveries, 

 known long before to the Egyptians, and even canal-making, 

 were taught them by their pupils the Greeks.* Their claims, 

 duly catalogued by Pliny, are amusing to us in these days ; 



* It must not, however, be supposed that, though Greece borrowed from 

 Egypt some notions in matters of curly taste, she was indebted for her religion 

 to that country; many resemblances in the two religions were owing to their 

 having had a common origin; and they also may be traced in the Vcdas with- 

 out our concluding that Ouranos was derived from Vurana, or that other 

 mythical personages came from India. And if Greece adopted the characters 

 and even names of some deities from Egypt, as Themis, from Thmei, and 

 others, this was only a custom common to Paganism, and one which was adopted 

 sometimes even by the Egyptians. 



