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tells us but by goats. At harvest-time the ears are cut with sickles, and the flax is beaten on the earth. Cattle tread out the corn, the crops of the year are stored in great lofts, and the amount of the vast herds is registered by stewards. Every official carries his writing-reed and papyrus-roll, and we know, from the records, which have been so marvellously preserved-certainly, they are the oldest of any papyri-that the reed was never wielded more accurately and surely than at that time. Round the houses were planted magnificent gardens, in which fruit was grown on standards and espaliers, and various sorts of vegetables were reared; the houses themselves, built of bricks and wood and gaily painted, with their verandahs and storehouses, were well furnished with neatly-wrought tables, seats, vases and other vessels. Dogs, from the slender greyhound to the bow-legged turnspit, and cats are family pets. Apes are kept as playthings and dwarfs to make sport with. In the kitchen, meat and ducks are slaughtered, stewed and roasted; and the master of the household has many to provide for, for the Governor of Mah-like the nobles of Memphis-had numerous serfs, who understood every description of handiwork. Carpenters and shipwrights fell and cut up trees; joiners and wheelwrights are to be seen at more delicate work; stonemasons, sculptors and decorators are hard at work; brick-makers mould the clay with their hands and knead it with their feet; potters make vessels for domestic use, turning and baking them to perfection; while glass-blowers make vases for finer uses.

Tanners and shoemakers are busy; and in the women's rooms they are weaving at the looms under the inspection of fat overseers whom we perceive to be eunuchs. Very elegant ornamental patterns are to be seen on the garments of the immigrant Semitic family, of which mention has been made; but the Egyptians were in no respect behind the Asiatics in the arts of weaving and dyeing.

If, too, we compare the sculptured companulate ornament on the pillars of the temple at Karnak with these much older painted decorations which are now before us, we have ocular demonstration that the ornaments first devised by the weaver and then adopted by the painter have finally been transferred by the sculptor and architect to the decoration of the pillar. Anton Springer says that ornamentation is the true parent of art, and he adds that art was not born of the struggle for existence but of delight in existence; and we have never met with a more vivid illustration of this principle than in the cave-dwellings of the dead at Beni Hasan, which survive from the period when architecture created her most characteristic element-the column as a composite member.

Those must have been happy times, when even the tomb was made bright with pictures. How fine are the grapes that the merry vintagers cut from the luxuriant vines! The juice is trodden and pressed out, stored in jars and deposited in airy lofts; for subterranean cellars are not in Egypt. Singers and harp and flute players perform their strains, and, as at the present day, the music is accompanied

by measured hand-clapping. Dancing is an artistic exercise by men and maidens. The strength of the youth is tested by wrestling matches, and even in these early times the ball flew from hand to hand. Draughts, morra and hot-cockles and other games are represented (these were carefully collected by Minutoli in an essay devoted to the subject), and the Nile resounds with shouts over boat-races, fishing excursions and bird-shooting. All this, of course, relates to the nobles and wealthy, who found their last rest in these tombs; but the lot of the serfs was not a hard one, for it is especially insisted on in the inscriptions that their masters were mild and benevolent. The noble Ameni-whose grave we first entered-says of himself that he was a good master, a prince that loved his people; that he did no wrong to the son of the poor man, nor oppressed the widow; that he distressed not the peasant and turned away nò shepherd; that he never took away the labourers of any small man (the master of any five serfs) for his own works, and that no man was miserable or hungry in his time; but that when a time of famine came he caused all the fields of the district of Mah to be tilled as far as the boundary-stones to the north and south (to the east and west the desert and the Nile marked its limits); that he supported the inhabitants and provided them with food, so that no starving man was found within its borders, and the widow was as well supplied as the woman with a husband; and that in all he spent the great man was not preferred before the

small.

To feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty and to clothe the naked, were the principal and reiterated requirements of the Egyptian moral law; and it would seem that, at the time of which we speak, they were not only preached but practiced.

THE LABYRINTH AT LAKE MORIS

LAURENCE OLIPHANT

HERE can be no doubt that we owe the modern

THE

no the of

word labyrinth to the strange accumulation of chambers and tortuous passages which once existed on the shores of Lake Moris. According to Manethon, the Labyrinth derived its name from King Labarys, its founder, also known as Amenemhat III.; but another derivation has been suggested which possesses the combined merit of extreme antiquity and originality. It seems that the old Egyptian word for the mouth of a reservoir, which Lake Maris undoubtedly was, is ra-hunt, or la-hunt. Hence one of the names of the lake was Hunt.

According to the estimate of Linant Bey, to whom is due the discovery of the site of the Labyrinth and the position of Lake Maris, this sheet of water must have been about sixty miles in circumference and with an average depth of twenty feet. Pomponius Mela says that it was navigated by large vessels, which conveyed the produce of the Fayoum to other parts of Egypt.

The Pyramid and Labyrinth were situated at the point where the river entered it, and the vast expanse of green over which the eye wanders between the Pyramid and Medinet was formerly covered by its waters. Wherever

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