in the attitude of walking, is a _chef d'oeuvre_
of delicacy and grace, and might be attributed to one of the best
schools of the XIIth dynasty, did not the inscriptions oblige us to
relegate it to the Theban art of the XIIIth. The heavy and commonplace
figure of the magnate now in the Vienna Museum is treated with a rather
coarse realism, but exhibits nevertheless most skilful tooling. It is
not exclusively at Thebes, or at Tanis, or in any of the other great
cities of Egypt, that we meet with excellent examples of work, or that
we can prove that flourishing schools of sculpture existed at this
period; probably there is scarcely any small town which would not
furnish us at the present day, if careful excavation were carried out,
with some monument or object worthy of being placed in a museum. During
the XIIIth dynasty both art and everything else in Egypt were fairly
prosperous. Nothing attained a very high standard, but, on the other
hand, nothing fell below a certain level of respectable mediocrity.
Wealth exercised, however, an injurious influence upon artistic taste.
The funerary statue, for instance, which Autuabri I. Horu ordered for
himself was of ebony, and seems to have been inlaid originally with
gold, whereas Kheops and Khephren were content to have theirs of
alabaster and diorite.

[Illustration: 415.jpg STATUE OF SOVKHOTPU III.]

Drawn by Boudier, from the sketch by Lepsius; the head was
"quite mutilated and separated from the bust."

During this dynasty we hear nothing of the inhabitants of the Sinaitic
Peninsula to the east, or of the Libyans to the west: it was in the
south, in Ethiopia, that the Pharaohs expended all their surplus energy.
The most important of them, Sovkhotpu I., had continued to register the
height of the Nile on the rocks of Semneh, but after his time we
are unable to say where the Nilometer was moved to, nor, indeed, who
displaced it. The middle basin of the river as far as Gebel-Barkal
was soon incorporated with Egypt, and the population became quickly
assimilated. The colonization of the larger islands of Say and Argo
took place first, as their isolation protected them from sudden attacks:
certain princes of the XIIIth dynasty built temples there, and erected
their statues within them, just as they would have done in any of the
most peaceful districts of the Said or the Delta. Argo is still at the
present day one of the largest of these Nubian islands:* it is said to