vention in the arts was over--the heroes of Craft, like Tubal Cain and
Daedalus, necessarily belong to the infancy of culture. The phenomenon
of Egypt could not occur again; the mission of Greece was rather to
settle down to a task of gathering, interpreting, and bringing to
perfection Egypt's gifts. The arts of civilization were never developed
in watertight compartments, as is shown by the uniformity of custom over
the modern world. Further, if any new nation enters into the circle of
culture it seems that, like Japan, it must 'borrow the capital'. The art
of Greece could hardly have been more self-originated than is the
science of Japan. Ideas of the temple and of the fortified town must
have spread from the East, the square-roomed house, columnar orders,
fine masonry, were all Egyptian.

Elsewhere[18] I have pointed out that it was the importance which the
Egyptian came to attach to the preservation of the dead and to the
making of adequate provision for the deceased's welfare that gradually
led to the aggrandisement of the tomb. In course of time this impelled
him to cut into the rock,[19] and, later still, suggested the
substitution of stone for brick in erecting the chapel of offerings
above ground. The Egyptian burial customs were thus intimately related
to the conceptions that grew up with the invention of embalming. The
evidence in confirmation of this is so precise that every one who
conscientiously examines it must be forced to the conclusion that man
did not instinctively select stone as a suitable material with which to
erect temples and houses, and forthwith begin to quarry and shape it for
such purposes.

There was an intimate connexion between the first use of stone for
building and the practice of mummification. It was probably for this
reason, and not from any abstract sense of "wonder at the magic of art,"
as Professor Lethaby claims, that "ideas of sacredness, of ritual
rightness, of magic stability and correspondence with the universe,
and of perfection of form and proportion" came to be associated with
stone buildings.

At first stone was used only for such sacred purposes, and the pharaoh
alone was entitled to use it for his palaces, in virtue of the fact that
he was divine, the son and incarnation on earth of the sun-god. It was
only when these Egyptian practices were transplanted to other countries,
where these restrictions did not obtain, that the rigid wall of
convention was broken down.