good birth, as may be seen by her carefully plaited hair and tunic.  The Theban ladies wore long robes; but this damsel has gathered up her skirts that she may thread her way among the reeds without wetting her garments.  The two musicians and the swimming girl belong, on the contrary, to an inferior, or servile, class.  Two of them wear only a girdle, and the third has a short garment negligently fastened.  The bearer of offerings (fig. 253) wears the long pendent tresses distinctive of childhood, and is one of those slender, growing girls of the fellahin class whom one sees in such numbers on the banks of the Nile.  Her lack of clothing is, however, no evidence of want of birth, for not even the children of nobility were wont to put on the garments of their sex before the period of adolescence.  Lastly, the slave (fig. 254), with his thick lips, his high shoulders, his flat nose, his heavy, animal jaw, his low brow, and his bare, conical head, is evidently a caricature of some foreign prisoner.  The dogged sullenness with which he trudges under his burden is admirably caught, while the angularities of the body, the type of the head, and the general arrangement of the parts, remind one of the terra-cotta grotesques of Asia Minor.  In these subjects, all the minor details, the fruits, the flowers, the various kinds of birds, are rendered with much truth and cleverness.  Of the three ducks which are tied by the feet and slung over the arms of the girl bearing offerings, two are resigned to their fate, and hang swinging with open eyes and outstretched necks; but the third flaps her wings and lifts her head protestingly.  The two small water-fowl perched upon the lotus flowers listen placidly to the lute-player’s music, their beaks resting on their crops.  They have learned by experience not to put themselves out of the way for a song, and they know that there is nothing to fear from a young girl, unless she is armed.  They are put to flight in the bas-reliefs by the mere sight of a bow and arrows, just as a company of rooks is put to flight nowadays by the sight of a gun.  The Egyptians were especially familiar with the ways of animals and birds, and reproduced them with marvellous exactness.  The habit of minutely observing minor facts became instinctive, and it informed their most trifling works with that air of reality which strikes us so forcibly at the present day.

[Illustration:  Fig. 254.—­Spoon.]

Household furniture was no more abundant in ancient Egypt than it is in the Egypt of to-day.  In the time of the Twelfth Dynasty an ordinary house contained no bedsteads, but low frameworks like the Nubian angareb; or mats rolled up by day on which the owners lay down at night in their clothes, pillowing their heads on earthenware, stone, or wooden head-rests.  There were also two or three simple stone seats, some wooden chairs or stools with carved legs, chests and boxes of various sizes for clothes and tools, and a few