In certain pieces belonging to various museums, such as the statues of Sepa and his wife at the Louvre, and the bas-reliefs of the tomb of Khabiusokari at Gizeh, critics have mistakenly recognised the faltering first efforts of an unskilled people.  The stiffness of attitude and gesture, the exaggerated squareness of the shoulders, the line of green paint under the eyes,—­in a word, all those characteristics which are quoted as signs of extreme antiquity, are found in certain monuments of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties.  The contemporary sculptors of any given period were not all equally skilful.  If some were capable of doing good work, the greater number were mere craftsmen; and we must be careful not to ascribe awkward manipulation, or lack of teaching, to the timidity of archaism.  The works of the primitive dynasties yet sleep undiscovered beneath seventy feet of sand at the foot of the Sphinx; those of the historic dynasties are daily exhumed from the depths of the neighbouring tombs.  These have not yielded Egyptian art as a whole; but they have familiarised us with one of its schools—­the school of Memphis.  The Delta, Hermopolis, Abydos, the environs of Thebes and Asuan[42], do not appear upon the stage earlier than towards the Sixth Dynasty; and even so, we know them through but a small number of sepulchres long since violated and despoiled.  The loss is probably not very great.  Memphis was the capital; and thither the presence of the Pharaohs must have attracted all the talent of the vassal principalities.  Judging from the results of our excavations in the Memphite necropolis alone, it is possible to determine the characteristics of both sculpture and painting in the time of Seneferu and his successors with as much exactness as if we were already in possession of all the monuments which the valley of the Nile yet holds in reserve for future explorers.

[Illustration:  Fig. 184.—­Panel from tomb of Hesi.]

The lesser folk of the art-world excelled in the manipulation of brush and chisel, and that their skill was of a high order is testified by the thousands of tableaux they have left behind them.  The relief is low; the colour sober; the composition learned.  Architecture, trees, vegetation, irregularities of ground, are summarily indicated, and are introduced only when necessary to the due interpretation of the scene represented.  Men and animals, on the other hand, are rendered with a wealth of detail, a truth of character, and sometimes a force of treatment, to which the later schools of Egyptian art rarely attained.  Six wooden panels from the tomb of Hesi in the Gizeh Museum represent perhaps the finest known specimens of this branch of art.  Mariette ascribed them to the Third Dynasty, and he may perhaps have been right; though for my own part I incline to date them from the Fifth Dynasty.  In these panels there is nothing that can be called a “subject.”  Hesi either sits or stands (fig. 184), and has four or five columns of hieroglyphs above his head; but the firmness of line, the subtlety of modelling, the ease of execution, are unequalled.  Never has wood been cut with a more delicate chisel or a firmer hand.