, of
the Twelfth Dynasty, and with his features. Those so-called Hyksos
monuments may be the products of a local school, the origin of which may
have been independent, and its traditions quite different from the
traditions of the Memphite workshops. But except at Abydos, El Kab, Asuan,
and some two or three other places, the provincial art of ancient Egypt is
so little known to us that I dare not lay too much stress upon this
hypothesis. Whatever the origin of the Tanite School, it continued to exist
long after the expulsion of the Hyksos invaders, since one of its best
examples, a group representing the Nile of the North and the Nile of the
South, bearing trays laden with flowers and fish, was consecrated by
Pisebkhanu of the Twenty-first Dynasty.

[Illustration: Fig. 197.--Bas-relief head of Seti I.]

[Illustration: Fig. 198.--The god Amen, and Horemheb.]

[Illustration: Fig. 199.--Head of a Queen, Eighteenth Dynasty.]

The first three dynasties of the New Empire[48] have bequeathed us more
monuments than all the others put together. Painted bas-reliefs, statues of
kings and private persons, colossi, sphinxes, may be counted by hundreds
between the mouths of the Nile and the fourth cataract. The old sacerdotal
cities, Memphis, Thebes, Abydos, are naturally the richest; but so great
was the impetus given to art, that even remote provincial towns, such as
Abu Simbel, Redesiyeh, and Mesheikh, have their _chefs-d'oeuvre_, like the
great cities. The official portraits of Amenhotep I. at Turin, of Thothmes
I. and Thothmes III. at the British Museum, at Karnak, at Turin, and at
Gizeh, are conceived in the style of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Dynasties,
and are deficient in originality; but the bas-reliefs in temples and tombs
show a marked advance upon those of the earlier ages. The modelling is
finer; the figures are more numerous and better grouped; the relief is
higher; the effects of perspective are more carefully worked out. The wall-
subjects of Deir el Bahari, the tableaux in the tombs of Hui, of Rekhmara,
of Anna, of Khamha, and of twenty more at Thebes, are surprisingly rich,
brilliant, and varied. Awakening to a sense of the picturesque, artists
introduced into their compositions all those details of architecture, of
uneven ground, of foreign plants, and the like, which formerly they
neglected, or barely indicated. The taste for the colossal, which had
fallen somewhat into abeyance since the time of the Great Sphi