with excellent examples of work, or that we can prove that flourishing schools of sculpture existed at this period; probably there is scarcely any small town which would not furnish us at the present day, if careful excavation were carried out, with some monument or object worthy of being placed in a museum.  During the XIIIth dynasty both art and everything else in Egypt were fairly prosperous.  Nothing attained a very high standard, but, on the other hand, nothing fell below a certain level of respectable mediocrity.  Wealth exercised, however, an injurious influence upon artistic taste.  The funerary statue, for instance, which Autuabri I. Horu ordered for himself was of ebony, and seems to have been inlaid originally with gold, whereas Kheops and Khephren were content to have theirs of alabaster and diorite.

[Illustration:  415.jpg STATUE OF SOVKHOTPU III.]

     Drawn by Boudier, from the sketch by Lepsius; the head was
     “quite mutilated and separated from the bust.”

During this dynasty we hear nothing of the inhabitants of the Sinaitic Peninsula to the east, or of the Libyans to the west:  it was in the south, in Ethiopia, that the Pharaohs expended all their surplus energy.  The most important of them, Sovkhotpu I., had continued to register the height of the Nile on the rocks of Semneh, but after his time we are unable to say where the Nilometer was moved to, nor, indeed, who displaced it.  The middle basin of the river as far as Gebel-Barkal was soon incorporated with Egypt, and the population became quickly assimilated.  The colonization of the larger islands of Say and Argo took place first, as their isolation protected them from sudden attacks:  certain princes of the XIIIth dynasty built temples there, and erected their statues within them, just as they would have done in any of the most peaceful districts of the Said or the Delta.  Argo is still at the present day one of the largest of these Nubian islands:* it is said to be 12 miles in length, and about 2 1/2 in width towards the middle.

     * The description of Argo and its ruins is borrowed from
     Caillaud, Voyage a Meroe, vol. ii. pp. 1-7.

It is partly wooded, and vegetation grows there with tropical luxuriance; creeping plants climb from tree to tree, and form an almost impenetrable undergrowth, which swarms with game secure from the sportsman.  A score of villages are dotted about in the clearings, and are surrounded by carefully cultivated fields, in which durra predominates.  An unknown Pharaoh of the XIIIth dynasty built, near to the principal village, a temple of considerable size; it covered an area, whose limits may still easily be traced, of 174 feet wide by 292 long from east to west.  The main body of the building was of sandstone, probably brought from the quarries of Tombos:  it has been pitilessly destroyed piecemeal by the inhabitants, and only a few insignificant fragments, on which some lines of hieroglyphs may still be deciphered, remain in situ.  A small statue of black granite of good workmanship is still standing in the midst of the ruins.  It represents Sovkhotpu III. sitting, with his hands resting on his knees; the head, which has been mutilated, lies beside the body.