protect the caravan routes, and a vast reservoir was erected near Aina to provide a store of water for the irrigation of the neighbouring country.  The Delta absorbed the greater part of the royal subsidies; it had suffered so much from the Libyan incursions, that the majority of the towns within it had fallen into a condition as miserable as that in which they were at the time of the expulsion of the Shepherds.  Heliopolis, Bubastis, Thmuis, Amu, and Tanis still preserved some remains of the buildings which had already been erected in them by Ramses; he constructed also, at the place at present called Tel el-Yahudiyeh, a royal palace of limestone, granite, and alabaster, of which the type is unique amongst all the structures hitherto discovered.  Its walls and columns were not ornamented with the usual sculptures incised in stone, but the whole of the decorations—­scenes as well as inscriptions—­consisted of plaques of enamelled terra-cotta set in cement.  The forms of men and animals and the lines of hieroglyphs, standing out in slight relief from a glazed and warm-coloured background, constitute an immense mosaic-work of many hues.  The few remains of the work show great purity of design and an extraordinary delicacy of tone.

[Illustration:  320.jpg SIGNS, ARMS AND INSTRUMENTS]

All the knowledge of the Egyptian painters, and all the technical skill of their artificers in ceramic, must have been employed to compose such harmoniously balanced decorations, with their free handling of line and colour, and their thousands of rosettes, squares, stars, and buttons of varicoloured pastes.*

* This temple has been known since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the Louvre is in possession of some fragments from it which came from Salt’s collection; it was rediscovered in 1870, and some portions of it were transferred by Mariette to the Boulaq Museum.  The remainder was destroyed by the fellahin, at the instigation of the enlightened amateurs of Cairo, and fragments of it have passed into various private collections.  The decoration has been attributed to Chaldoan influence, but it is a work purely Egyptian, both in style and in technique.

[Illustration:  321.jpg THE COLOSSAL OSIRIAN FIGURES in THE FIRST COURT AT MEDINET-HABU]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Beato.

The difficulties to overcome were so appalling, that when the marvellous work was once accomplished, no subsequent attempt was made to construct a second like it:  all the remaining structures of Ramses III., whether at Memphis, in the neighbourhood of Abydos, or at Karnak, were in the conventional style of the Pharaohs.  He determined, nevertheless, to give to the exterior of the Memnonium, which he built near Medinet-Habu for the worship of himself, the proportions and appearance of an Asiatic “Migdol,” influenced probably by his remembrance of similar structures which he had seen during his Syrian campaign.