nal part of my inquiry.

When I had written thus far in this chapter, I went from the
reading-room of the British Museum, where all day I had been working,
to spend a last quiet hour in the Egyptian Galleries. I knew one at
least of these galleries well, but as a rule I had hurried through it,
as so many of the reading-room students do, to reach the
refreshment-room which is placed there. I found I had never really
seen anything. This time it was different, for my thoughts were aflame
with the life of this people, whose wonderful civilisation speaks in
all these sculptured remains through the silence of the centuries.
Some fresh thought came to me as I waited to look at first one statue
and then another. I sought for those which represented women. There is
a small statue in green basalt of Isis holding a figure of Osiris
Un-nefer, her son.[236] The goddess is represented as much larger than
the young god, who stands at her feet. The marriage of Isis with her
brother Osiris did not blot out her independent position, her
importance as a deity remained to the end greater than his. Think for
a moment what this placing of the goddess, rather than the god, in the
forefront of Egyptian worship signifies; very clearly it reflects the
honour in which the sex to whom the supreme deity belongs was held. In
the third Egyptian room is a seated statuette of Queen Teta-Khart, a
wife of Aaehmes I (1600 B.C.), whose title was "Royal Mother," and
another figure of Queen Amenartas of the XXVth Dynasty 700 B.C.; near
by is a beautiful head of the stone figure of a priestess.[237] There
is something enigmatic and strangely seductive in the Egyptian faces;
a joy and calmness which are implicit in freedom. And the impression
is helped by the fixed attitudes, usually seated and always facing the
spectator, and also by the great size of many of the figures; one
seems to realise something of the simplicity and strength of the
tireless enduring power of these women and men.

But I think what interested me most of all was the little difference
manifested in the representations of the two sexes. The dress which
each wears is very much the same; the attitudes are alike, and so
often are the faces, even in the figures there seems no accentuation
of the sexual characters. Often I did not know whether it was at a man
or a woman, a god or a goddess, I was looking, until the title of the
statue told me. How strange this seemed to me, and yet how signifi