"If it were true that Egypt owed its political existence to Ethiopia, we should be able to find in the latter country monuments of a more remote antiquity, and as we descended the Nile, we should find the remains comparatively modern; but, strangely enough, the study of all these monuments incontestably proves that the sequence of towns, holy places, and tombs, constructed by the Egyptians on the banks of their river, follow each other in such chronological order that the oldest remains, the Pyramids, are found in the north, in Lower Egypt, near the southern point of the Delta. The nearer our steps take us to the cataracts of Ethiopia, the less ancient do the monuments become. They show ever increasing signs of the decadence of art, of taste, and of the love for beauty. Finally, the art of Ethiopia, such as its still existing monuments reveal it to us, is entirely wanting in originality. A glance is sufficient to tell us that it represents the degeneracy only of the Egyptian style, that the spirit of Egyptian forms has been weakly grasped, and that their execution is generally mediocre."[56] [56] BRUGSCH-BEY, _Histoire de l'Égypt_, pp. 6 and 7. Maspero's _Histoire ancienne_, p. 382, may also be consulted upon the character of the Ethiopian kingdom and the monuments of Napata. A good idea of this process of degradation may be gained by merely glancing through the plates to part v. of Lepsius's _Denkmæler_; plate 6, for example, shows what the caryatid became at Napata. We may condense all these views into a simple and easily remembered formula; we may say that _as we mount towards the springs of the Nile, we descend the current of time_. Thebes is younger than Memphis, and Meroè than Thebes. The river which Egypt worshipped, and by which the walls of its cities were bathed, flowed from the centre of Africa, from the south to the north; but the stream of civilization flowed in the other direction, until it was lost in the country of the negro, in the mysterious depths of Ethiopia. The springs of this latter stream must be sought in that district where the waters of the Nile, as if tired by their long journey, divide into several arms before falling into the sea; in that district near the modern capital, over which stretch the long shadows of the Pyramids. § 4. _The Constitution of Egyptian Society--Influence of that Constitution upon Monuments of Art._