with difficulty.  A large vase with a short foot and a lofty cone-shaped cover stands amid the trees.[78] The craftsmen who made this piece evidently valued elegance and beauty less than richness.  They cared little for the heavy effect and bad taste of the whole, provided only that they were praised for their skill, and for the quantity of metal which they had succeeded in using.  Other vases of the same type, pictured in a scene of presentations to Rameses II. in the great temple of Abu Simbel, vary the subject by showing buffaloes running in and out among the trees, in place of led giraffes.  These were costly playthings wrought in gold, such as the Byzantine emperors of the ninth century accumulated in their palace of Magnaura, and which they exhibited on state occasions in order to impress foreigners with a profound sense of their riches and power.  When a victorious Pharaoh returned from a distant campaign, the vessels of gold and silver which formed part of his booty figured in the triumphal procession, together with his train of foreign captives.  Vases in daily use were of slighter make and less encumbered with inconvenient ornaments.  The two leopards which serve as handles to a crater of the time of Thothmes III. (fig. 293) are not well proportioned, neither do they combine agreeably with the curves of the vase; but the accompanying cup (fig. 294), and a cruet belonging to the same service (fig. 295), are very happily conceived, and have much purity of form.  These vessels of engraved and repousse gold and silver, some representing hunting scenes and incidents of battle, were imitated by Phoenician craftsmen, and, being exported to Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy, carried Egyptian patterns and subjects into distant lands.  The passion for precious metals was pushed to such extremes under the reigns of the Ramessides that it was no longer enough to use them only at table.

[Illustration:  Fig. 293.—­Crater of precious metal.  Wall-painting, Eighteenth Dynasty.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 294.—­Cup of precious metal.  Wall-painting, Eighteenth Dynasty.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 295.—­Cruet of precious metal.  Wall-painting, Eighteenth Dynasty.]

Rameses II. and Rameses III. had thrones of gold—­not merely of wood plated with gold, but made of the solid metal and set with precious stones.  These things were too valuable to escape destruction, and were the first to disappear.  Their artistic value, however, by no means equalled their intrinsic value, and the loss is not one for which we need be inconsolable.

[Illustration:  Fig. 296.—­Bezel signet-ring.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 297.—­Gold cloisonne pectoral bearing cartouche of Usertesen III.  From Dahshur, found 1894, and now in the Gizeh Museum.]