The artistic value of the find is another matter. There can be no question but that this splendid collection of the finest work of the craftsmen of the XVIIIth Dynasty, by far the greatest assemblage of such work known to exist, will prove of the utmost importance in shaping and correcting our ideas of Egyptian art at one of the most interesting points of its long development. Never before has such a mass of material of the highest class been available for study. Yet even here it would be rash to assume that the result will be any considerable modification of our views as to the period of culmination of the art of the New Empire. At the most, and assuming that all the art of the tomb is strictly of the time of the king with whose burial it is associated, and that its quality is all of the supreme standard which has been attributed to it, the net result would be the shifting of the apex of the curve a matter of thirty or thirty-five years, a small thing when we are dealing with an art whose history is written in millenniums. But it seems likely that even this is more than we need necessarily assume. There is always the possibility that in the tomb of Tutankhamen we are dealing, not only with the splendours of one king, but perhaps also with many of the heirlooms of the royal house to which he belonged, in which case we should be faced with specimens of the art, not of one period of a few years’ duration, but with those of perhaps a whole century, perhaps of a longer period still. The work of sifting out the various sources and periods of the materials found in the tomb will prove a most fascinating, if also a most difficult, task; when it is accomplished--the work of years--we may be in a position to speak more definitely about the change or the confirmation which the tomb of Tutankhamen has brought to our previous theories of the growth and decline of Egyptian art; meanwhile we must wait, with the assurance that even in the extremest case, the discovery can scarcely commit us to anything revolutionary of our previous conceptions.