ich it never wholly lost, was
scarcely regarded as a defect at an epoch when certain sculptors in the
service of Rome especially affected the archaic style. I should not be
surprised if those statues of priests and priestesses wearing divine
insignia, with which Hadrian adorned the Egyptian rooms of his villa at
Tibur, might not be attributed to the artists of this hybrid school. In
those parts which were remote from the Delta, native art, being left to its
own resources, languished, and slowly perished. Nor was this because Greek
models, or even Greek artists, were lacking. In the Thebaid, in the Fayum,
at Syene, I have both discovered and purchased statuettes and statues of
Hellenic style, and of correct and careful execution. One of these, from
Coptos, is apparently a miniature replica of a Venus analogous to the Venus
of Milo. But the provincial sculptors were too dull, or too ignorant, to
take such advantage of these models as was taken by their Alexandrian
brethren. When they sought to render the Greek suppleness of figure and
fulness of limb, they only succeeded in missing the rigid but learned
precision of their former masters. In place of the fine, delicate, low
relief of the old school, they adopted a relief which, though very
prominent, was soft, round, and feebly modelled. The eyes of their
personages have a foolish leer; the nostrils slant upwards; the corners of
the mouth, the chin, and indeed all the features, are drawn up as if
converging towards a central point, which is stationed in the middle of the
ear. Two schools, each independent of the other, have bequeathed their
works to us. The least known flourished in Ethiopia, at the court of the
half-civilised kings who resided at Meroe. A group brought from Naga in
1882, and now in the Gizeh collection, shows the work of this school during
the first century of our era (fig. 209). A god and a queen, standing side
by side, are roughly cut in a block of grey granite. The work is coarse and
heavy, but not without energy. Isolated and lost in the midst of savage
tribes, the school which produced it sank rapidly into barbarism, and
expired towards the end of the age of the Antonines. The Egyptian school,
sheltered by the power of Rome, survived a little longer. As sagacious as
the Ptolemies, the Caesars knew that by flattering the religious prejudices
of their Egyptian subjects they consolidated their own rule in the valley
of the Nile. At an enormous cost, they r