This strange assertion was long accepted without question even in modern times. We need not go back to the archæologists of the last century, whose credulity is to be accounted for by their lack of materials for the formation of a better judgment. In 1828 in his first lecture at the Bibliothèque Royale, Raoul-Rochette turned his attention to Egypt. He had before his eyes, in the Parisian museums and in the _Description de l'Égypte_, works which dated from the finest periods of the Theban dynasties, although the still more ancient monuments which now form the glory of the Boulak Museum were not yet discovered; he might have perceived and pointed out the difference between the statues of Ousourtesen, Thothmes, and Rameses on the one hand, and those of the Sait epoch; still more should he have remarked upon the characteristics which distinguish the monuments of independent Egypt from those which were erected under the Ptolemies and the Roman emperors. What he did say, however, and say with consummate confidence was: "From the first of the Pharaohs to the last of the Ptolemies, the art of Egypt never varied."[85] [85] _Cours d'Archéologie_, 8vo. 1829, pp. 10, 11. This critic's ideas upon Egyptian art were both superficial and false. "Egyptian art," he says, "never attempted any realistic imitation." We even find sentences utterly devoid of meaning, such as, for instance, "The fundamental principle of Egyptian art was the absence of art." (p. 12.) Such crude notions as this can no longer be upheld. M. Marriette protests in the following almost indignant terms against certain utterances of M. Renan which seemed to him to imply the same doctrine. "M. Renan loves[86] to represent ancient Egypt as a sort of China, walled in and fortified against the exterior world, immovable, old even in its infancy, and arrived by a single spring at a degree of civilization which it never surpassed. He looks upon the country as a great plain, green indeed and fertile, but without accidents of contour to break the monotony of the landscape. And yet Egypt had periods of grandeur and decadence more marked than those of other countries. Her civilization went through all the different phases; it went through many complete transformations, it had its sudden moments of brilliancy and its epochs of eclipse. Its art was not so stationary as to prevent us from writing its history. The influence of Egypt was felt from Mesopotamia to the equator. Thothmes, in a word, was no Chinaman. Egypt perished because in attacking foreign nations she provoked a reaction which was fatal to her."[87] [86] See the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ of April 1, 1865. [87] _Voyage dans la Haute Égypte_, vol. i.