w of floreated-like decorations, and each
decoration shows on its side a concentric circle, consisting of three
rings,--the whole ornament being one which is found in later Egyptian
eras, not unfrequently along the tops of walls in the interior of
chambers, etc. Mr. Perring represents this fragment of sculpturing from
the brick Pyramid of Dashoor, in his folio work, _The Pyramids of
Gizeh_, plate xiii. Fig. 7. Hence among the very earliest Egyptian
lapidary decorations we have, as in other countries, the appearance of
the simple circular ornamentation.

Besides, more complex circular and spiral decorations, in the form of
the well-known guilloche and scroll, were made use of in Egypt during
the sixth dynasty, or immediately after the Memphite dynasty that reared
the larger Pyramids of Gizeh. Thus, speaking of the ancient Egyptian
architectural decorations, Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson observes--"The
Egyptians did not always confine themselves to the mere imitation of
natural objects for ornament; and their ceilings and cornices offer
numerous graceful fancy devices, among which are the guilloche,
miscalled Tuscan borders, the chevron, and the scroll patterns. They are
to be met with in a tomb of the time of the sixth dynasty; they are
therefore known in Egypt many ages before they were adopted by the
Greeks, and the most complicated form of the guilloche covered a whole
Egyptian ceiling, upwards of a thousand years before it was represented
on those comparatively late objects found at Nineveh."--_Popular account
of the Ancient Egyptians,_ ii. 290.

III.--ERA OF THE ARABIAN HISTORIAN, IBN ABD AL HAKM. (_Page_ 236.)

Professor Smyth owns that the grooves and pin holes which the coffer in
the King's Chamber presents, were (to use his own words) "in fact to
admit a sliding sarcophagus cover or lid" (see _ante_, p. 236,
footnote). But in his recent communication to the Royal Society on the
20th April, he doubted Al Hakm's account of the mummy having been
actually found in the sarcophagus when the King's Chamber was first
entered by the Caliph Al Mamoon, in the ninth century, arguing, on the
authority of a Glasgow gentleman, that the historian himself, Al Hakm,
did not live for three or four centuries afterwards, and, therefore,
could not be relied upon. But all this reasoning or assertion is simply
a mistake. In a late letter (7th April), Dr. Rieu of the British
Museum,--the chief living authority among us on any such Arabic