This volume, then, will treat of the remains of early Egyptian art at a length which would seem at first sight out of due proportion to their number, but later ages will also be represented by a series of monuments, which will bring us down to the Persian conquest. This limit will hardly be over-passed in our choice of examples for study, and that for two reasons. The first is, that at the latter period the evolution of Egyptian art was complete, it had created all that it could and had become a slave to its own past. Disposing under the Ptolemies of all the resources of a great empire, it indeed introduced certain architectural changes which do not seem to have been borrowed from previous buildings, but those changes were of no very great importance and were mostly in matters of detail. In sculpture and painting we can easily see that it abandoned itself to mere copying, to the repetition of a lesson learnt by rote. Whatever had to be done, was done in accordance with fixed tradition, and one monument only differed from another in the amount of care and manual dexterity bestowed upon it. [Illustration: FIG. 57.--Ti, with his wife and son.] Our second reason is this, that Egypt was opened to the Greeks in the time of the Sait princes. From the year 650 B.C. onwards, there was constant communication between Ionia and the cities of the Delta. If at any time Greek art borrowed directly from that of Egypt, it was during the second half of the seventh century and the first half of the sixth. By the end of the sixth century, it had become so original and so skilful in the management of its selected methods of expression that it could not have been very receptive to foreign influences. After the Persian wars such influences would be still more powerless. In the Ptolemaic era the state of things was reversed; Greece imposed her language, her literature, her religious conceptions and their visible symbols upon the whole eastern world. Even then the art of Egypt could defend, and even perpetuate itself, by the power of custom and of a tradition which had been handed down through so many centuries, but the day was past when it could provoke imitation. As for the indirect borrowings of forms and motives which Greece received from Egypt through the Phœnicians, their transmission had come to an end before the Persian conquest, even before the time of Psemethek. Egypt was represented, either immediately or through the imitative powers of the Syrian manufacturers, in the first textiles, jewels, and vases of clay or metal, carried by the Sidonian merchants to the savage ancestors of the Greeks. In this roundabout manner she had probably more influence over Greece than in their periods of more direct communication. The rays kindled upon her hearth, the earliest of civilization, fell upon the Hellenic isles as refracted rays, after passing through the varied media of Chaldæa, Assyria or Phœnicia.