factories from the earliest beginning of the Middle Empire.  This blue was brilliant, yet tender, in imitation of turquoise or lapis lazuli.  The Gizeh Museum formerly contained three hippopotamuses of this shade, discovered in the tomb of an Entef[62] at Drah Abu’l Neggeh[63] One was lying down, the two others were standing in the marshes, their bodies being covered by the potter with pen-and-ink sketches of reeds and lotus plants, amid which hover birds and butterflies (fig. 229).  This was his naive way of depicting the animal amid his natural surroundings.  The blue is splendid, and we must overleap twenty centuries before we again find so pure a colour among the funerary statuettes of Deir el Bahari.  Green reappears under the Saite dynasties, but paler than that of more ancient times, and it prevailed in the north of Egypt, at Memphis, Bubastis, and Sais, without entirely banishing the blue.  The other colours before mentioned were in current use for not more than four or five centuries; that is to say, from the time of Ahmes I. to the time of the Ramessides.  It was then, and only then, that ushabtiu of white or red glaze, rosettes and lotus flowers in yellow, red, and violet, and parti-coloured kohl-pots abounded.  The potters of the time of Amenhotep III. affected greys and violets.  The olive-shaped amulets which are inscribed with the names of this Pharaoh and the princesses of his family are decorated with pale blue hieroglyphs upon a delicate mauve ground.  The vase of Queen Tii in the Gizeh collection is of grey and blue, with ornaments in two colours round the neck.  The fabrication of many-coloured enamels seems to have attained its greatest development under Khuenaten; at all events, it was at Tell el Amarna that I found the brightest and most delicately fashioned specimens, such as yellow, green, and violet rings, blue and white fleurettes, fish, lutes, figs, and bunches of grapes.[64] One little statuette of Horus has a red face and a blue body; a ring bezel bears the name of a king in violet upon a ground of light blue.  However restricted the space, the various colours are laid in with so sure a hand that they never run one into the other, but stand out separately and vividly.  A vase to contain antimony powder, chased and mounted on a pierced stand, is glazed with reddish brown (fig. 230).  Another, in the shape of a mitred hawk, is blue picked out with black spots.  It belonged of old to Ahmes I. A third, hollowed out of the body of an energetic little hedgehog, is of a changeable green (fig. 231).  A Pharaoh’s head in dead blue wears a klaft[65] with dark-blue stripes.

[Illustration:  Fig. 232.]

Fine as these pieces are, the chef-d’oeuvre of the series is a statuette of one Ptahmes, first Prophet of Amen, now in the Gizeh Museum.  The hieroglyphic inscriptions as well as the details of the mummy bandages are chased in relief upon a white ground of admirable smoothness afterwards filled in with enamel.  The face and hands are of turquoise blue; the head-dress is yellow, with violet stripes; the hieroglyphic characters of the inscription, and the vulture with outspread wings upon the breast of the figure, are also violet.  The whole is delicate, brilliant, and harmonious; not a flaw mars the purity of the contours or the clearness of the lines.