The little town of Ha-hetep-Senusert, Kahun as it is now called, gives us the most complete instance extant of the character of an Egyptian town of the Middle Kingdom. It occupied an area of about 18 acres, and the plans of the narrow streets and of the houses, mostly small and closely crowded together, though there are exceptions to this rule, have been completely wrought out. Much that is interesting in the way of pottery, tools, and papyri came from the ruins of the deserted houses of the little pyramid-town, whose existence seems to have been a very brief one, probably not much longer than was necessary for the erection of the pyramid. Again it was not in Amenemhat’s elaborately devised pyramid at Hawara, but in the Roman cemetery to the north of it, that the great find was made which has made Hawara famous in the history of ancient Egyptian art, and has given us one of the most valuable contributions ever made to our knowledge of the processes and technique of ancient painting. A cemetery which dates mostly from A.D. instead of from B.C. has in general comparatively little attraction to the explorer in ancient Egypt, unless he be a specialist in the Greco-Roman Period. Accordingly, when Petrie in 1888 found that the cemetery in question was of the first and second centuries A.D., he was on the point of giving it up as not worth working, when one day a mummy was found with a painted portrait on a wooden panel inserted above its face. The picture was a beautifully drawn head of a girl, painted in soft tones, and quite un-Egyptian in its style. It proved to be only the forerunner of a whole series of similar portraits, of which about sixty were found before the excavations closed. The work was resumed in 1911 with further success. The portraits are of varying merit, and of even the best of them it has to be remembered that we are not dealing with the product of the studio of a skilled artist, but only with that of the workshop of a firm of local undertakers, who supplied funerary portraits just as they supplied coffins. All things considered the quality of the work is wonderfully good, and the information given by these panel pictures as to the methods of the ancient painters is of the highest importance. Before the Hawara discoveries, we were left very much in the dark as to how Apelles, Zeuxis, Polygnotus and their companions and rivals produced the masterpieces which have only survived in the literary descriptions of their contemporaries. The Hawara pictures may be very far, even the best of them, from being masterpieces; but at least they tell us what were the methods by which the great painters of ancient Greece produced the pictures which were considered the equals in artistic merit of the statues which are now the wonder of the world. The manner in which they were painted is often described as “encaustic,” but this is an incorrect description of portraits which, so far as can be judged, were simply painted with