some very elegant, are found in the tombs.  Women wore loose robes, ear-rings, finger-rings, bracelets, armlets, anklets, gold necklaces.  In the tombs are found vases for ointment, mirrors, combs, needles.  Doctors and drugs were not unknown to them; and the passport system is no modern invention, for their deeds contain careful descriptions of the person, exactly in the style with which European travellers are familiar.  We have only mentioned a small part of the customs and arts with which the tombs of the Egyptians show them to have been familiar.  These instances are mostly taken from Wilkinson, whose works contain numerous engravings from the monuments which more than verify all we have said.

The celebrated French Egyptologist, M. Mariette, has very much enlarged our knowledge of the more ancient dynasties, by his explorations, first under a mission from the French government, and afterward from that of Egypt.  The immense temples and palaces of Thebes are all of a date at least B.C. 1000.  We know the history of Egypt very well as far back as the time of the Hyksos, or to the eighteenth dynasty.  M. Mariette has discovered statues and Sphinxes which he believes to have been the work of the Hyksos, the features being wholly different from that of the typical Egyptian.  Four of these Sphinxes, found by Mariette on the site of the old Tanis, have the regular body of a lion, according to the canon of Egyptian art, but the human heads are wholly un-Egyptian.  Mariette, in describing them, says that in the true Egyptian Sphinx there is always a quiet majesty, the eye calm and wide open, a smile on the lips, a round face, and a peculiar coiffure with wide open wings.  Nothing of this is to be found in these Sphinxes.  Their eyes are small, the nose aquiline, the cheeks hard, the mouth drawn down with a grave expression.

These Shepherd Kings, the Hyksos, ruled Lower Egypt, according to Manetho, five hundred and eleven years, which, according to Renan,[150] brings the preceding dynasty (the fourteenth of Manetho) as early as B.C. 2000.  Monuments of the twelfth and thirteenth dynasties are common.  The oldest obelisk dates B.C. 2800.  Thanks to the excavations of M. Mariette, we now have a large quantity of sculptures and statues of a still earlier epoch.  M. Renan describes[151] tombs visited by himself, which he considers to be the oldest known, and which he regards as being B.C. 4000,[152] where were represented all the details of domestic life.  The tone of these pictures was glad and gay; and, what is remarkable, they had no trace of the funeral ritual or the god Osiris.  These were not like tombs, but rather like homes.  To secure the body from all profanation, it was concealed in a pit, carefully hidden in the solid masonry.  These tombs belong to the six first dynasties.

The great antiquity of Egyptian civilization is universally admitted; but to fix its chronology and precise age becomes very difficult, from the fact that the Egyptians had no era from which to date forward or backward.  This question we shall return to in a subsequent section of this chapter.