3J 



food — luxuries and necessities for the Ka double of the deceased. 

 To this part of the Egyptian religion we owe the thousands of 

 objects which now adorn our Museums. 



The emblems of the gods either in statuary, pictures or 

 amulets protected the deceased from evil influences and enabled 

 him to continue to exist, and the imitative figures of various 

 foods, drink and other necessaries enabled the Ka or double, as. 

 Maspero calls it, to lead a pleasant life in Amenti, the paradise 

 which was believed in. 



Egyptians believed that it was possible] to transmit to the 

 figure or picture of any man, woman, animal or living creature 

 the soul of the being which it represented, its qualtiies and attri- 

 butes, and thus every statue possessed, to the people of Egypt,, 

 an indwelling spirit. Christianised Egyptians proved that they 

 held this belief by their endeavour to throw down and destroy 

 the statues of the gods of the Greeks and Romans and thus bring 

 to nought the spirits which dwelt in them. It is stated in 

 the Apocryphal Gospels that when the Virgin Mary and her Son 

 arrived in Egypt there was quaking through all the land and 

 all the the idols fell down from their pedestals and were broken 

 in pieces. Then a certain priest explained that the footstep of 

 the Son of the hidden God had fallen on the land of Egypt, they 

 accepted this and made a figure of this God. 



It is unfortunate that neither in England nor any European 

 country has a single book been produced treating in sufficient 

 detail of the whole history of antique Art, following its progress 

 and transformations from its origin down to the epoch when the 

 barbaric invasions put an end to the ancient forms of civilisation, 

 and prepared for the birth of a modern world and the evolution 

 of a new Art. 



Works compiled by the savants who accompanied Bonaparte 

 to Egypt first introduced the antiquities to us, but at that time 

 Champollion and those who followed him had not discovered the 

 key to the hieroglyphics, and therefore the descriptions of the 

 monuments do not enable us to assign relative dates to them. 



The result of discovery has been to show that the most 

 ancient Art-civilisation sprang from Chaldea and the Valley of 

 the Nile, Egyptian Art being the more ancient. Beautiful and 

 wonderful specimens of art, of which we possess examples, were 

 produced during the long series of Egyptian dvnasties from the 

 age of Mena, and, through the agency of the Phoenicians, there 

 was an exchange of ideas and of objects of art, traces of which 

 can be found both in Egypt and in Assyria. 



Much influence in art was spread by the Phoenicians, who 

 were the agents of intercourse between Egvpt and the East, the 

 people of Asia Minor and Assyria, and the bonds are close which 

 bind the Hellenic civilisation to the far more ancient system which 

 was born on the banks of the Nile, and crept up the valleys of the 

 Tigris and Euphrates to spread itself over Asia Minor. The 



