Hence the unities of the subject are never strictly observed in these enormous bas-reliefs.  The main object being to perpetuate the memory of a victorious Pharaoh, that Pharaoh necessarily plays the leading part; but instead of selecting from among his striking deeds some one leading episode pre-eminently calculated to illustrate his greatness, the Egyptian artist delighted to present the successive incidents of his campaigns at a single coup d’oeil.  Thus treated, the pylons of Luxor and the Ramesseum show a Syrian night attack upon the Egyptian camp; a seizure of spies sent by the prince of the Kheta for the express purpose of being caught and giving false intelligence of his movements; the king’s household troops surprised and broken by the Khetan chariots; the battle of Kadesh and its various incidents, so furnishing us, as it were, with a series of illustrated despatches of the Syrian campaign undertaken by Rameses II. in the fifth year of his reign.  After this fashion precisely did the painters of the earliest Italian schools depict within the one field, and in one uninterrupted sequence, the several episodes of a single narrative.  The scenes are irregularly dispersed over the surface of the wall, without any marked lines of separation, and, as with the bas-reliefs upon the column of Trajan, one is often in danger of dividing the groups in the wrong place, and of confusing the characters.  This method is reserved almost exclusively for official art.  In the interior decoration of temples and tombs, the various parts of the one subject are distributed in rows ranged one above the other, from the ground line to the cornice.  Thus another difficulty is added to the number of those which prevent us from understanding the style and intention of Egyptian design.  We often imagine that we are looking at a series of isolated scenes, when in fact we have before our eyes the disjecta membra of a single composition.  Take, for example, one wall-side of the tomb of Ptahhotep at Sakkarah (fig. 176).  If we would discover the link which divides these separate scenes, we shall do well to compare this wall-subject with the mosaic at Palestrina (fig. 177), a monument of Graeco-Roman time which represents almost the same scenes, grouped, however, after a style more familiar to our ways of seeing and thinking.  The Nile occupies the immediate foreground of the picture, and extends as far as the foot of the mountains in the distance.  Towns rise from the water’s edge; and not only towns, but obelisks, farm-houses, and towers of Graeco-Italian style, more like the buildings depicted in Pompeian landscapes than the monuments of the Pharaohs.  Of these buildings, only the large temple in the middle distance to the right of the picture, with its pylon gateway and its four Osirian colossi, recalls the general arrangement of Egyptian architecture.  To the left, a party of sportsmen in a large boat are seen in the act of harpooning the hippopotamus and crocodile.  To