TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 819 



The principal results are in the first dynasty. The school of fine ivory carvin<; 

 at that time shows work equal to any that succeeded it in later history. The 

 appreciation of form, the delicacy of the muscular curves, and the power of ex- 

 pression is as good as in the hest classical or renaissance carvings. The .art of 

 glazing was applied to large wall-tiles, used for covering brick walls, and to vases, 

 as shown by part of a large vase with the name of Menes. The use of two-colour 

 glazes, a purple inlay in green, appears in the name of Menes. Hence glazing was 

 as advanced at the beginning of the first dynasty, about 4700 B.C., as it was for 

 three thousand years later, until the polychrome glazes of the eighteentli dynasty. 



The European relations of Egypt are further illustrated by finding the same 

 black pottery in the first dyuasty that is known in Crete as late neolithic. The 

 camel is shown in the first dyuasty by a well-modelled head ; hitherto it was not 

 proved to have been in Egypt till about four thousand years later. 



In the well-known age of the fourth dynasty we have for the first time the 

 portrait of the best known of all the kings, Cheops or Khufu, whose appearance, 

 however, was as yet quite unknown. A minutely carved ivory figure, the face 

 of which is only i inch high, shows his character in an astonishing manner. The 

 energy, decision, and driving power is perhaps stronger than in any other portrait 

 that we know. The tradition of his closing the temples and forbidding sacrifices 

 is fully confirmed by finding that no large temple existed in the fourth dynasty, 

 such as those of the earlier or later times : only a bed of vegetable ashes is found 

 in a cell, and throughout it hundreds of clay Jiotilia as substitutes for sacrifices, 

 not a single bono of an animal occurring in the whole mass. 



The worship in the temple of Abydos was originally tjiat of the jackal god 

 Up-uatu, ' the opener of w.iys,' who showed the paths in the desert for the souls 

 to go to the west. Osiris does not appear in any temple inscription for two thou- 

 sand years, and is not prominent till yet later. Some large decrees of the fifth and 

 sixth dynasties were i'ound ; and the oldest piece of certainly dated iron, apparently 

 a wedge, of the sixth dynasty, about 3400 B.C. This site has fully shown how 

 important it is to dissect minutely a temple site in which only earth" remains, and 

 where at first tlie absence of stone walls might lead to the idea that nothing was 

 left there; the art of the beginning of the Egyptian monarchy lay hidden in that 

 ground. 



7. The Beginning of the Egyptian Kingdom. 

 By Professor W. M. Flinders Petrie, D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S. 



For generations past the origins of Egyptian civilisation had been a mystery ; 

 the earliest period there Imown, the pyramid times, showed a very high civilisa- 

 tion, and its rise was entirely unknown. In the past ten years most of tlie stages 

 which led from a savage state up to the highest development have been brought 

 to light. The discovery of the prehistoric age and its division into regular 

 sequences of remains has filled up a period of over two thousand years, whicli — 

 beginning with men in goatskins witli the simplest pottery— ran through a wealthy 

 and elaborate ago of civilisation, and was in decadence when it was overthrown 

 by the dynastic Egyptians. Of the five dillerent types of man before the dynasties, 

 porlraits of which were published two years ago," the fiftli type, with the forward 

 beard, is from the monuments shown to be Libyan, and thus easily connected 

 with the same type in early Greece. 



The rise of the dynastic power has been brought to liglit in the remains of the 

 royal tombs of the first and second dynasties, and some probably before the first 

 dynasty, excavated at Abydos iu ]<)00 and 1001. The connection of the clo.se of the 

 prehistoric .«cale of sequence with the early kings has been closely settled hv the 

 pottery, and its history shown in the stratified ruins of the earliest town of 

 Abydos; so that we pass without a break from the sequence dates of the pre- 

 historic age to the historic reigns of the kings. Four kings' names are found 

 which, from the nature of their remains and their tombs, appe.nr to belong to the 

 dynasty of ten kings which preceded Menes, the first king of all Egvpt. 



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