the right, a group of legionaries, drawn up in front of a temple and preceded by a priest, salute a passing galley.  Towards the middle of the foreground, in the shade of an arched trellis thrown across a small branch of the Nile, some half-clad men and women are singing and carousing.  Little papyrus skiffs, each rowed by a single boatman, and other vessels fill the vacant spaces of the composition.  Behind the buildings we see the commencement of the desert.  The water forms large pools at the base of overhanging hills, and various animals, real or imaginary, are pursued by shaven-headed hunters in the upper part of the picture.  Now, precisely after the manner of the Roman mosaicist, the old Egyptian artist placed himself, as it were, on the Nile, and reproduced all that lay between his own standpoint and the horizon.  In the wall-painting (fig. 176) the river flows along the line next the floor, boats come and go, and boatmen fall to blows with punting poles and gaffs.  In the division next above, we see the river bank and the adjoining flats, where a party of slaves, hidden in the long grasses, trap and catch birds.  Higher still, boat-making, rope-making, and fish-curing are going on.  Finally, in the highest register of all, next the ceiling, are depicted the barren hills and undulating plains of the desert, where greyhounds chase the gazelle, and hunters trammel big game with the lasso.  Each longitudinal section corresponds, in fact, with a plane of the landscape; but the artist, instead of placing his planes in perspective, has treated them separately, and placed them one above the other.  We find the same disposition of the parts in all Egyptian tomb paintings.  Scenes of inundation and civil life are ranged along the base of the wall, mountain subjects and hunting scenes being invariably placed high up.  Sometimes, interposed between these two extremes, the artist has introduced subjects dealing with the pursuits of the herdsman, the field labourer, and the craftsman.  Elsewhere, he suppresses these intermediary episodes, and passes abruptly from the watery to the sandy region.  Thus, the mosaic of Palestrina and the tomb-paintings of Pharaonic Egypt reproduce the same group of subjects, treated after the conventional styles and methods of two different schools of art.  Like the mosaic, the wall scenes of the tomb formed, not a series of independent scenes, but an ordinary composition, the unity of which is readily recognised by such as are skilled to read the art-language of the period.

2.—­TECHNICAL PROCESSES.

[Illustration:  Fig. 178.—­Sculptor’s sketch from Ancient Empire tomb.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 179.—­Sculptor’s sketch from Ancient Empire tomb.]