scale.  Secondary scenes are generally separated by a horizontal line, but this line is not indispensable.  When masses of figures formed in regular order had to be shown, the vertical planes lapped over, so to speak, according to the caprice of the limner.  At the battle of Kadesh, the files of Egyptian infantry rise man above man, waist high, from top to bottom of the phalanx (fig. 172); while those of the Kheta, or Hittite battalions, show but one head above another (fig. 173).

[Illustration:  Fig. 172.—­Phalanx of Egyptian infantry, Ramesseum.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 173.—­Hittite battalion, Ramesseum.]

It was not only in their treatment of men and animals that the Egyptians allowed themselves this latitude.  Houses, trees, land and water, were as freely misrepresented.  An oblong rectangle placed upright, or on its side, and covered with regular zigzags, represents a canal.  Lest one should be in doubt as to its meaning, fishes and crocodiles are put in, to show that it is water, and nothing but water.  Boats are seen floating upright upon this edgewise surface; the flocks ford it where it is shallow; and the angler with his line marks the spot where the water ends and the bank begins.  Sometimes the rectangle is seen suspended like a framed picture, at about half way of the height of several palm trees (fig. 174); whereby we are given to understand a tank bordered on both sides by trees.  Sometimes, again, as in the tomb of Rekhmara, the trees are laid down in rows round the four sides of a square pond, while a profile boat conveying a dead man in his shrine, hauled by slaves also shown in profile, floats on the vertical surface of the water (fig. 175).  The Theban catacombs of the Ramesside period supply abundant examples of contrivances of this kind; and, having noted them, we end by not knowing which most to wonder at—­the obstinacy of the Egyptians in not seeking to discover the natural laws of perspective, or the inexhaustible wealth of resource which enabled them to invent so many false relations between the various parts of their subjects.

[Illustration:  Fig. 174.—­Pond and palm-trees, from wall painting in tomb of Rekhmara, Eighteenth Dynasty.]

When employed upon a very large scale, their methods of composition shock the eye less than when applied to small subjects.  We instinctively feel that even the ablest artist must sometimes have played fast and loose with the laws of perspective, if tasked to cover the enormous surfaces of Egyptian pylons.

[Illustration:  Fig. 175.—­Scene from tomb of Rekhmara, Eighteenth Dynasty.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 176.—­Scene from Mastaba of Ptahhotep, Fifth Dynasty.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 177.—­Palestrina mosaic.]