ye instinctively tones down whatever is too
forcible, and supplies what is lacking. Thanks to these subtle devices of
the ancient craftsman, a tiny statuette of this or that divinity measuring
scarcely an inch and a quarter in height, has almost the breadth and
dignity of a colossus.

The earthly goods of the gods and of the dead were mostly in solid stone. I
have elsewhere described the little funerary obelisks, the altar bases, the
statues, and the tables of offerings found in tombs of the ancient empire.
These tables were made of alabaster and limestone during the Pyramid
period, of granite or red sandstone under the Theban kings, and of basalt
or serpentine from the time of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. But the fashions
were not canonical, all stones being found at all periods. Some offering-
tables are mere flat discs, or discs very slightly hollowed. Others are
rectangular, and are sculptured in relief with a service of loaves, vases,
fruits, and quarters of beef and gazelle. In one instance--the offering-
table of Situ--the libations, instead of running off, fell into a square
basin which is marked off in divisions, showing the height of the Nile at
the different seasons of the year in the reservoirs of Memphis; namely,
twenty-five cubits in summer during the inundation, twenty-three in autumn
and early winter, and twenty-two at the close of winter and in spring-time.
In these various patterns there was little beauty; yet one offering-table,
found at Sakkarah, is a real work of art. It is of alabaster. Two lions,
standing side by side, support a sloping, rectangular tablet, whence the
libation ran off by a small channel into a vase placed between the tails of
the lions. The alabaster geese found at Lisht are not without artistic
merit. They are cut length-wise down the middle, and hollowed out, in the
fashion of a box. Those which I have seen elsewhere, and, generally
speaking, all simulacra of offerings, as loaves, cakes, heads of oxen or
gazelles, bunches of black grapes, and the like, in carved and painted
limestone, are of doubtful taste and clumsy execution. They are not very
common, and I have met with them only in tombs of the Fifth and Twelfth
Dynasties. "Canopic" vases, on the contrary, were always carefully wrought.
They were generally made in two kinds of stone, limestone and alabaster;
but the heads which surmounted them were often of painted wood. The canopic
vases of Pepi I. are of alabaster; and those of