heir high cheek-bones stand out from their hollow
cheeks, and their blue or black eyes are buried under their enormous
eyebrows. The lower part of the face is square and somewhat heavy, but
it is often concealed by a thick and curly beard. The forehead is rather
low and retreating, while the nose has a distinctly aquiline curve. The
type is not on the whole so fine as the Egyptian, but it is not so heavy
as that of the Chaldaeans in the time of Gudea. The Theban artists have
represented it in their battle-scenes, and while individualising every
soldier or Asiatic prisoner with a happy knack so as to avoid monotony,
they have with much intelligence impressed upon all of them the marks of
a common parentage.

[Illustration: 219.jpg]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the original wooden object.

One feels that the artists must have recognised them as belonging to one
common family. They associated with their efforts after true and exact
representation a certain caustic humour, which impelled them often to
substitute for a portrait a more or less jocose caricature of their
adversaries. On the walls of the Pylons, and in places where the majesty
of a god restrained them from departing too openly from their official
gravity, they contented themselves with exaggerating from panel to panel
the contortions and pitiable expressions of the captive chiefs as they
followed behind the triumphal chariot of the Pharaoh on his return from
his Syrian campaigns.*

* An illustration of this will be found in the line of
prisoners, brought by Seti I. from his great Asiatic
campaign, which is depicted on the outer face of the north
wall of the hypostyle at Karnak.

Where religious scruples offered no obstacle they abandoned themselves
to the inspiration of the moment, and gave themselves freely up to
caricature. It is an Amorite or Canaanite--that thick-lipped, flat-nosed
slave, with his brutal lower jaw and smooth conical skull--who serves
for the handle of a spoon in the museum of the Louvre. The stupefied air
with which he trudges under his burden is rendered in the most natural
manner, and the flattening to which his forehead had been subjected
in infancy is unfeelingly accentuated. The model which served for this
object must have been intentionally brutalised and disfigured in order
to excite the laughter of Pharaoh's subjects.*

* Dr. Regnault thinks that the head was artificially
deformed in infanc