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The oldest mural paintings disclose a state of the arts of civilization so
advanced as to surprise even those who have made archaeology a study, and
who consequently know how few new things there are under the sun. It is
_not_ astonishing to find houses with doors and windows, with verandas,
with barns for grain, vineyards, gardens, fruit-trees, etc. We might also
expect, since man is a fighting animal, to see, as we do, pictures of
marching troops, armed with spears and shields, bows, slings, daggers,
axes, maces, and the boomerang; or to notice coats of mail, standards,
war-chariots; or to find the assault of forts by means of scaling-ladders.
But these ancient tombs also exhibit to us scenes of domestic life and
manners which would seem to belong to the nineteenth century after our
era, rather than to the fifteenth century before it. Thus we see monkeys
trained to gather fruit from the trees in an orchard; houses furnished
with a great variety of chairs, tables, ottomans, carpets, couches, as
elegant and elaborate as any used now. There are comic and _genre_
pictures of parties, where the gentlemen and ladies are sometimes
represented as being the worse for wine; of dances where ballet-girls in
short dresses perform very modern-looking pirouettes; of exercises in
wrestling, games of ball, games of chance like chess or checkers, of
throwing knives at a mark, of the modern thimblerig, wooden dolls for
children, curiously carved wooden boxes, dice, and toy-balls. There are
men and women playing on harps, flutes, pipes, cymbals, trumpets, drums,
guitars, and tambourines. Glass was, till recently, believed to be a
modern invention, unknown to the ancients. But we find it commonly used as
early as the age of Osertasen I., more than three thousand eight hundred
years ago; and we have pictures of glass-blowing and of glass bottles as
far back as the fourth dynasty. The best Venetian glass-workers are unable
to rival some of the old Egyptian work; for the Egyptians could combine
all colors in one cup, introduce gold between two surfaces of glass, and
finish in glass details of feathers, etc., which it now requires a
microscope to make out. It is evident, therefore, that they understood the
use of the magnifying-glass. The Egyptians also imitated successfully the
colors of precious stones, and could even make statues thirteen feet high,
closely resembling an emerald. They also made mosaics in glass, of
wonderfully bri