of the hieroglyphics have been cut with a firmness of touch and a
precision, of which marble offers but few examples. The figures have
elegance and correctness of contour, of which I never thought Egyptian
sculpture susceptible. Here, too, I could judge of the style of this
people in subjects which had neither hieroglyphic, nor historical, nor
scientific; for there were representations of small scenes taken from
nature, in which the stiff profile outlines, so common with Egyptian
artists, were exchanged for supple and natural attitudes; groups of
persons were given in perspective, and cut in deeper relief than I
should have supposed anything but metal could have been worked."

The Sepulchres of the Kings of Thebes are mentioned by Diodorus Siculus
as wonderful works, and such as could never be exceeded by anything
afterwards executed in this kind. He says that forty-seven of them were
mentioned in their history; that only seventeen of them remained to the
time of Ptolemy Lagus; adding that most of them were destroyed in his
time. Strabo says, that above the Memnonium, the precise locality of
Denon's description, were the sepulchres of the kings of Thebes, in
grottos cut out of the rock, being about forty in number, wonderfully
executed and worthy to be seen. In these, he says, were obelisks with
inscriptions on them, setting forth the riches, power, and empire of
these kings, as far as Scythia, Bactria, India, and Ionia, their great
revenues, and their immense armies, consisting of one million of men.

In Egypt, the honors paid to the dead partook of the nature of a
religious homage. By the process of embalming, they endeavored to
preserve the body from the common laws of nature; and they provided
those magnificent and durable habitations for the dead--sublime
monuments of human folly--which have not preserved but buried the memory
of their founders. By a singular fatality, the well-adapted punishment
of pride, the extraordinary precautions by which it seemed in a manner
to triumph over death, have only led to a more humiliating
disappointment. The splendor of the tomb has but attracted the violence
of rapine; the sarcophagus has been violated; and while other bodies
have quietly returned to their native dust in the bosom of their mother
earth, the Egyptian, converted into a mummy, has been preserved only to
the insults of curiosity, or avarice, or barbarism.

THE PYRAMIDS OF EGYPT.

The pyramids of Egypt, e