The sculptor of statues for a long time past was not a whit less skilful than the artist who executed bas-reliefs.  The sculptor was doubtless often obliged to give enormous proportions to the figure of the king, to prevent his being overshadowed by the mass of buildings among which the statue was to appear; but this necessity of exaggerating the human form did not destroy in the artist that sense of proportion and that skilful handling of the chisel which are so strikingly displayed in the sitting scribe or in the princess at Meidum; it merely trained him to mark out deftly the principal lines, and to calculate the volume and dimensions of these gigantic granite figures of some fifty to sixty-five feet high, with as great confidence and skill as he would have employed upon any statue of ordinary dimensions which might be entrusted to him.  The colossal statues at Abu-Simbel and Thebes still witness to the incomparable skill of the Theban sculptors in the difficult art of imagining and executing superhuman types.  The decadence of Egyptian art did not begin until the time of Ramses III., but its downward progress was rapid, and the statues of the Ramesside period are of little or no artistic value.  The form of these figures is poor, the technique crude, and the expression of the faces mean and commonplace.  They betray the hand of a mechanical workman who, while still in the possession of the instruments of his trade, can infuse no new life into the traditions of the schools, nor break away from them altogether.

[Illustration:  040.jpg THE KNEELING SCRIBE AT TURIN]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Petrie; the scribe bears upon his right shoulder, perhaps tattooed, the human image of the god Amon-Ra, whose animal emblem he embraces.

We must look, not to the royal studios, but to the workshops connected with the necropolis, if we want to find statues of half life-size displaying intelligent workmanship, all of which we might be tempted to refer to the XVIIIth dynasty if the inscriptions upon them did not fix their date some two or three centuries later.  An example of them may be seen at Turin in the kneeling scribe embracing a ram-headed altar:  the face is youthful, and has an expression at once so gentle and intelligent that we are constrained to overlook the imperfections in the bust and legs of the figure.  Specimens of this kind are not numerous, and their rarity is easily accounted for.  The multitude of priests, soldiers, workmen, and small middle-class people who made up the bulk of the Theban population had aspirations for a luxury little commensurate with their means, and the tombs of such people are, therefore, full of objects which simulate a character they do not possess, and are deceptive to the eye:  such were the statuettes made of wood, substituted from economical motives instead of the limestone or sandstone statues usually provided as supporters for the “double.”