Our task is no easy one. While limiting our study in the fashion which has been described, we must not fail to extend our purview to every fact which may help to justify the comparison which we propose to institute between the arts of Greece and those of the nations by whose teachings she profited. There is but one road to success in this double task. We must devote the greatest possible care to our study of the details in question, and then give the general results of that study; we must make ourselves thoroughly acquainted with all the phenomena, but must confine our exposition to the general laws which governed them, such as our minute inquiries have presented them to us. No circumstantial description need, therefore, be looked for in these pages even in the case of the most important and famous buildings of Egypt. No monograph upon any tomb or temple will be found, but we shall ourselves have examined many tombs and temples; we shall, to speak figuratively, have taken them to pieces, and by means of the knowledge acquired we shall endeavour to make our readers acquainted with the notions of the Egyptians upon sepulchral and religious architecture, and with the changes which those conceptions underwent in the course of centuries. Thus, for example, we have explored the pages of Lepsius[90] and Prisse d'Avennes[91] for information relating to the sepulchres of the first six dynasties, and further researches have been made on the spot expressly for the present work, but we shall not give any descriptions or illustrations of those works individually; we shall merely use them for an ideal restoration of the characteristic tombhouse of the ancient empire. We may, perhaps, for this purpose, make a more particular reference to one or two sepulchres which are in unusually good preservation, but only for the sake of giving firm definition to the type and to its main variations. [90] _Denkmæler aus Ægypten und Æthiopien_ (from drawings of the expedition sent into Egypt in 1842, which remained there till 1845), 12 vols. folio. Berlin, no date.