Whatever hesitations and doubts there may be as to the right of the ancient Egyptian to rank high among the artistic nations of the world, there can be none as to his place as a craftsman. In prehistoric days he was already the finest flint-worker that the world has ever known, so that his flint knives are to this day the standards by which all other similar work falls to be tested, and in presence of which it always comes short; while his vessels of hard stone were shaped, with a skill and a patience which to us seem little short of marvellous, into shapes of grace and beauty which have never been surpassed by the workers of any land or time. Later he translated these into fine pottery, and was always a skilful and satisfying potter, though his work never perhaps attained the grace and beauty of that of his brother craftsman over the sea in Crete. His greatest gift to us in this respect was his development of the art of covering pottery of all kinds with the exquisite glazes which still charm us on scarabs, amulets, ushabti figures, and all sorts of vessels. As a linen worker, of course, he was incomparable, and the finest specimens of modern linen look wretchedly coarse when viewed under a microscope alongside the best products of his loom. The earliest jewellery of the world was of his workmanship, and the bracelets of the Ist Dynasty queen found at Abydos show us that the Egyptian jeweller of six thousand years ago needed no lessons from any of the most skilled modern practitioners of the crafts. Indeed, all through the history of the land the craftsmanship of the goldsmith was beyond reproach. In the later periods his design was much inferior to the happy inspirations of the morning of art, though his technique was fairly well maintained to the end; but in the best days of the craft, which pretty closely correspond to the best days of the history, design and technique were alike admirable. Anything finer in their own way than the diadems of Khnumit, the royal crown, or the pectorals of the Lahun treasure, it is impossible to imagine, while if the standard of the furniture in the tomb of Tutankhamen is maintained by the jewellery, we may look for evidence from this source that the skill of the craftsman had not degenerated in the interval between the Middle Kingdom and the New Empire.