than the forms of others; while in some the contours of the chest are more accentuated, and the legs farther apart, than in others.  The master had little to correct in the work of these subordinates.  Here and there he made a head more erect, accentuated or modified the outline of a knee, or improved some detail of arrangement.  In one instance, however, at Kom Ombo, on the ceiling of a Graeco-Roman portico, some of the divinities had been falsely oriented, their feet being placed where their arms should have been.  The master consequently outlined them afresh, and on the same squared surface, without effacing the first drawing.  Here, at all events, the mistake was discovered in time.  At Karnak, on the north wall of the hypostyle hall, and again at Medinet Habu, the faults of the original design were not noticed till the sculptor had finished his part of the work.  The figures of Seti I. and Rameses III. were thrown too far back, and threatened to overbalance themselves; so they were smoothed over with cement and cut anew.  Now, the cement has flaked off, and the work of the first chisel is exposed to view.  Seti I. and Rameses III. have each two profiles, the one very lightly marked, the other boldly cut into the surface of the stone (fig. 180).

[Illustration:  Fig. 180.—­Sculptor’s correction, Medinet Habu, Rameses III.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 181.—­Bow drill.]

The sculptors of ancient Egypt were not so well equipped as those of our own day.  A kneeling scribe in limestone at the Gizeh Museum has been carved with the chisel, the grooves left by the tool being visible on his skin.  A statue in grey serpentine, in the same collection, bears traces of the use of two different tools, the body being spotted all over with point-marks, and the unfinished head being blocked out splinter by splinter with a small hammer.  Similar observations, and the study of the monuments, show that the drill (fig. 181), the toothed-chisel, and the gouge were also employed.  There have been endless discussions as to whether these tools were of iron or of bronze.  Iron, it is argued, was deemed impure.  No one could make use of it, even for the basest needs of daily life, without incurring a taint prejudicial to the soul both in this world and the next.  But the impurity of any given object never sufficed to prevent the employment of it when required.  Pigs also were impure; yet the Egyptians bred them.  They bred them, indeed, so abundantly in certain districts, that our worthy Herodotus tells us how the swine were turned into the fields after seed-sowing, in order that they might tread in the grain.  So also iron, like many other things in Egypt, was pure or impure according to circumstances.  If some traditions held it up to odium as an evil thing, and stigmatised it as the “bones of Typhon,” other traditions equally venerable affirmed that it was the very substance of the canopy of heaven.  So authoritative was this view, that iron was currently