[Illustration:  Fig. 206.—­Head of a scribe.  Saite work.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 207.—­Colossus of Alexander II.]

The new departure was of slow development.  Sculptors began by clothing the successors of Alexander in Egyptian garb and transforming them into Pharaohs, just as they had in olden time transformed the Hyksos and the Persians.  Works dating from the reigns of the first Ptolemies scarcely differ from those of the best Saite period, and it is only here and there that we detect traces of Greek influence.  Thus, the colossus of Alexander II., at Gizeh (fig. 207), wears a flowing head-dress, from beneath which his crisp curls have found their way.  Soon, however, the sight of Greek masterpieces led the Egyptians of Alexandria, of Memphis, and of the cities of the Delta to modify their artistic methods.  Then arose a mixed school, which combined certain elements of the national art with certain other elements borrowed from Hellenic art.  The Alexandrian Isis of the Gizeh Museum is clad as the Isis of Pharaonic times; but she has lost the old slender shape and straitened bearing.  A mutilated effigy of a Prince of Siut, also at Gizeh, would almost pass for an indifferent Greek statue.

[Illustration:  Fig. 208.—­Statue of Hor, Graeco-Egyptian.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 209.—­Group from Naga.]

The most forcible work of this hybrid class which has come down to us is the portrait-statue of one Hor (fig. 208), discovered in 1881 at the foot of Kom ed Damas, the site of the tomb of Alexander.  The head is good, though in a somewhat dry style.  The long, pinched nose, the close-set eyes, the small mouth with drawn-in corners, the square chin,—­every feature, in short, contributes to give a hard and obstinate character to the face.  The hair is closely cropped, yet not so closely as to prevent it from dividing naturally into thick, short curls.  The body, clothed in the chlamys, is awkwardly shapen, and too narrow for the head.  One arm hangs pendent; the other is brought round to the front; the feet are lost.  All these monuments are the results of few excavations; and I do not doubt that the soil of Alexandria would yield many such, if it could be methodically explored.  The school which produced them continued to draw nearer and nearer to the schools of Greece, and the stiff manner, which it never wholly lost, was scarcely regarded as a defect at an epoch when certain sculptors in the service of Rome especially affected the archaic style.  I should not be surprised if those statues of priests and priestesses wearing divine insignia, with which Hadrian adorned the Egyptian rooms of his villa at Tibur, might not be attributed to the artists of this hybrid school.  In those parts which were remote from the Delta, native art, being left to its own resources, languished, and slowly perished.  Nor was this because Greek models, or even Greek artists, were lacking.  In the Thebaid, in the Fayum, at Syene, I have both discovered and