enough to hold his cattle and granaries wherein to stock his grain. His living and sleeping rooms were usually low and small, but, judging by the models of houses which are to be seen in our museums, he often sat on the roof in a sort of small summerhouse, where he could catch the breeze; the roof was approached by means of a flight of steps in the courtyard. The cooking for his house was done in the courtyard by his wives and female slaves.

Among miscellaneous Egyptian buildings must be mentioned the fortified or fenced cities, which were very numerous, and were surrounded by thick walls and guarded by gates; in fact, any place where many men of means had assembled and accumulated wealth had to be fortified in order that their possessions might be defended against the attacks of marauding tribes. The fortresses at Semnah, in Nubia, and Al-kâb, in Upper Egypt, are excellent examples of such buildings, and the ruins of them. prove that the Egyptians were skilful military architects, and that they not only knew how to choose a site for a fort, but how to erect on it a strong building. In places where they had the choice of more than one site they invariably selected the best, and they seem instinctively to have availed themselves of every advantage which the natural position of that site gave them. The space here available will not permit of any attempt being made to describe methods of construction and cognate matters, but attention must be called to the fact that the Egyptian architects did not pay sufficient attention either to the making of foundations, or to the roofing of their temples. The expert researches made by Mr. Somers Clarke at Al-kâb, Karnak, Dêr al-Baharî, and other sites, have revealed some very curious facts about the scantiness and insecurity of the foundations of columns, etc., and the wonder is that the temples have stood so long in the condition in which we now find them. The whole civilized

world laments the falling of eleven pillars at Karnak in 1899, but an examination of the foundations shows that in the first place they were too small, and in the second that the materials of which they were made had been thrown into them in a reckless fashion. The question that now arises is, "Are the foundations of all the columns of Egyptian temples as badly made?" and none but an expert can answer it satisfactorily. It is clear that we owe the preservation of most of the temples to the heaps of rubbish which had covered them up, and it is equally clear that no one should be allowed to remove such heaps from precious ruins except under the advice of some competent architect or engineer. The field of Egyptology is so large in these days, that the archæologist cannot expect to become a skilled engineer, still less ought he to take upon himself the risk of destroying the ruins of buildings which form part of the scientific heritage not of the Egyptians only, but of the present and future civilized nations of the world.

The Pillar and the Column,* after the walls, are perhaps the most prominent features of the Egyptian building. The oldest pillars were square, and generally monolithic, and the sides were either parallel or slightly tapering upwards; frequently they had neither base nor capital. In the Early Empire they were not decorated in any way, but in the Middle Empire the sides were ornamented with scenes and inscriptions, or with bas-reliefs, or with figures of gods in very high relief, and the capitals with Hathor heads and sistra. The "Osirian Pillar," ie., a pillar with an upright colossal figure of Osiris in high relief on one side of it, is seen to advantage both in the second court in the temple of Madinat Habu, and in the rock-hewn temple at

*For fuller information on these subjects the reader is referred to Perrot and Chipiez, L'Égypte, p. 346, ff., and for examples to Prisse d'Avennes, Histoire de l'Art, to which excellent work I am indebted for the illustrations here given.

ሰ)

Abu Simbel; in the Sûdân the god chosen to decorate
rectangular pillars was Bes, as may be seen from the ruins
of the temples at Gebel Barkal and Bâ-Nagaa. A variety
of the rectangular pillar is the pillar stele, of which ex-
amples are to be
found at Karnak,
but it seems never
to have been used
as an actual support.
Out of the rectan-
gular pillar a new
variety was made by
cutting off the four
angles; thus the pil-
lar had eight sides
instead of four;
when it was desired
to make the appear-
ance of the new
variety of pillar
lighter still, the eight
angles were cut off,
and the pillar now
had sixteen sides.
Examples of both
kinds of pillar will
be found in the same
tomb at Beni Ḥasan.
To these new forms,
which are called
polygonal, polyhe-

Pillar stelae inscribed with the names of
Thothmes III., XVIIIth dynasty.

dral or prismatic, bases and capitals were added, and thus they came to be compared with certain Greek pillars and so called Proto-Doric. Another interesting variety of the rectangular pillar is found at Beni Ḥasan,

and is called cruciform. The column has many varieties, but all have the same characteristics; it has a base, and a capital, which is surmounted by a rectangular slab of stone, whereon the framework of the

Entrance to the tomb of Khnemu-hetep II. at Beni Hasan, with

(From a photograph by A. Beato of Luxor.)

roof rests. The capitals are of several kinds: the bud capital, the cup capital, the palm capital. A curious variety of the cup capital occurs at Karnak, where in a part of the building of Thothmes III. the capitals are in the form of inverted cups. In the time of the Ptolemies the architect or master-mason made many variations in the details of the capitals, and frequently with very pleasing results; the authorities, however, do not seem to be agreed as to the canon of proportion employed.

It is at present impossible to gauge by years the antiquity of the period when the Egyptians began to be skilled in the art of sculpture and the making of bas-reliefs, but it is

certain that in pre-dynastic times they possessed marvellous skill in working the hardest kinds of stone, and in the early dynasties they were masters in the art of painting statues to resemble their living originals. In estimating the character of Egyptian

sculpture, it must be remembered

that many statues and bas-reliefs

were exe

cuted al-lu

most me

chanically,

and probably at a

fixed rate, to satisfy convention

al requirements; in such work

the highest skill is not to be looked

for. Speak

ing general

culminate between the middle of the IVth and the end of the Vth dynasty. At this period statues and bas-reliefs, and the hieroglyphics of inscriptions, both raised and incuse, possessed a fidelity to life, an attention to detail, and a