131 
linen was, no doubt, a very early manufacture in Egypt, 
but the representations on their temples of the transparent 
fabrics, emphatically called " woven air," forcibly recal to 
mind the finest muslins of India. Dr. Thomson (Hist, of 
Chemistry) has adduced the remarkable passage of 
Pliny, lib. xxxv. c. 11, to show that the Egyptians were 
acquainted with a process very similar to Calico-printing, 
an art which the Hindoos have practised from time imme- 
morial. 
Architecture, however, is the art which has most gene- 
rally been acknowledged, and naturally so, from its con- 
spicuous nature, to be that in which the resemblance is 
most striking. The peculiar style, and the colossal dimen- 
sions of the cave-built temples of Upper Egypt, bear so 
strong a resemblance to those of Elephanta, Salsette, 
and Ellora, in Western and Peninsular India; as" to have 
induced many authors to ascribe a common origin to 
nations, which, in the earliest ages, and at such distances 
from each other, produced such similar structures. The 
very same mode of quarrying great blocks of stone by 
means of fire, and apparently the same mode of polishing 
the hardest rocks, was practised by the one, as it now is by 
the other. So similar is some of the architecture of the two 
countries, that the recent work on " Egyptian Antiquities, 1 ' 
has a special chapter on Indian temples. This similarity is 
also seen in the peculiar mode of making arches, common to 
the two countries,* and likewise in the varied design and 
* In the observations on the old Temple of Vishvesliwur, in Prinsep's 
Views of Benares, it is stated that the domes of Hindoo temples, built 
after ancient models, are not formed on the principle of the arch, but by 
successive protrusion of the courses of stone, and by cutting off the angles 
laterally, so as to change the square into a polygon, and thence gradually 
into a circle. The same may, I think, be seen in the ancient Hindoo temple 
in the fort of Adjighur, as well as, I believe, in the fort of Kallinjer, where 
gigantic sculpture and cave-built temples on a small scale are also conspicuous. 
So " we find in Egypt, ancient arches of stone, constructed, not as ours, 
with 
