of kings. The date is uncertain, but it is
somewhere near 3,500 B.C. The seat of empire, at that time, was
located at Memphis in Lower Egypt, and it is among the remains of this

Memphitic Period that the earliest and best painting is found. In
fact, all Egyptian art, literature, language, civilization, seem at
their highest point of perfection in the period farthest removed from
us. In that earliest age the finest portrait busts were cut, and the
painting, found chiefly in the tombs and on the mummy-cases, was the
attempted realistic with not a little of spirited individuality. The
figure was rather short and squat, the face a little squarer than the
conventional type afterward adopted, the action better, and the
positions, attitudes, and gestures more truthful to local
characteristics. The domestic scenes--hunting, fishing, tilling,
grazing--were all shown in the one flat, planeless, shadowless method
of representation, but with better drawing and color and more variety
than appeared later on. Still, more or less conventional types were
used, even in this early time, and continued to be used all through
Egyptian history.

[Illustration: FIG. 4.--VIGNETTE ON PAPYRUS, LOUVRE. (FROM PERROT AND
CHIPIEZ.)]

The Memphitic Period comes down to the eleventh dynasty. In the
fifteenth dynasty comes the invasion of the so-called Hyksos, or
Shepherd Kings. Little is known of the Hyksos, and, in painting, the
next stage is the

Theban Period, which, culminated in Thebes, in Upper Egypt, with
Rameses II., of the nineteenth dynasty. Painting had then changed
somewhat both in subject and character. The time was one of great
temple and palace building, and, though the painting of _genre_
subjects in tombs and sepulchres continued, the general body of art
became more monumental and subservient to architecture. Painting was
put to work on temple and palace-walls, depicting processional scenes,
either religious or monarchical, and vast in extent. The figure, too,
changed slightly. It became longer, slighter, with a pronounced nose,
thick lips, and long eye. From constant repetition, rather than any
set rule or canon, this figure grew conventional, and was reproduced
as a type in a mechanical and unvarying manner for hundreds of years.
It was, in fact, only a variation from the original Egyptian type seen
in the tombs of the earliest dynasties. There was a great quantity of
art produced during the Theban Period, and of a graceful, d