Practically the whole of our knowledge of the conditions under which life was lived in Egypt, of the organisation of society, of the arts and crafts by which the needs and tastes of the people were met, is due to the results of excavation during the last century. We owe, of course, a great deal to the statements of Herodotus and Diodorus as to the conditions which they found existing in their time; but the great source of information must always be the mass of first-hand material which has been gathered, mainly from the tombs with their wealth of funerary furnishings, by the work of the excavator. Therefore it would seem that the fitting conclusion to our brief survey of the various aspects of excavation should be a sketch of the life of ancient Egypt, with the arts and crafts which ministered to its necessities and its luxuries. Such a sketch must, of course, be of the slightest and least elaborated type, for the amount of material is so enormous that only the most salient points can be touched; but it may still be true so far as it goes, and may perhaps serve as an outline within which further details may be inserted by the student of ancient Egyptian life. First of all, we may take the framework of society. Through the whole of Egyptian history the outline of this is very much the same, though there are many variations in the relative importance of the various parts. The head of the state is always the Pharaoh, placed on a level immensely above even the most powerful of his subjects, but, as we shall see, by no means an irresponsible tyrant, but rather a limited monarch, governing in accordance with strictly defined customs. Beneath him are the great nobles and the great official class--two sections of society which were not in ancient Egypt, as in so many other ancient realms, virtually different names for the same thing. Then came the priestly class, at all times one of the most important in the land, and tending at certain periods, with the weakening of the royal power, to overshadow all the other interests. It appears that there was a definitely military class, with definite lands assigned to it for its support, though in the earlier days of the kingdom the wars were not the business of a separate class of professional soldiers, but were carried on by a general levy of the people. The other great land-holding class of the nation was that of the husbandmen, who apparently were much of our own old yeoman type, holding their land by the payment of taxes.