Egyptian art began with portraiture. As soon as it was capable of carving and painting stone it was realistic, not so much by instinct and taste as by duty. After such a beginning it found great difficulty in raising itself above intelligent and faithful reproduction of fact. Such inventive powers as it possessed were spent in creating a type for the royal majesty, and in that case it had concrete reality as a starting point. When it came to representing the gods it had no such help. It could not fall back upon fidelity to fact, and, unlike the Greeks of after ages, it was unable to give them distinction by the superior nobility and dignity of their physical contours and features. It was reduced to differentiating them by the variety of their attributes. By such a proceeding it obtained an almost infinite number of divine types, but each type was only recognizable on condition that its pose and accessories, once determined, should remain without material change. There was none of the mobility and elasticity which distinguishes the dwellers on the Greek Olympus, as may be clearly seen by comparing the poverty and want of variety of a Horus or a Bast with the infinite diversity of an Apollo or an Artemis. When the Egyptian sculptor had to endow the national gods with concrete forms he found himself, then, in a condition much less favourable than that of his Greek successors. This position, too, was materially affected by the fact that the best site in the temple, the centre of the naos, was reserved for a symbol, sometimes living, sometimes inanimate, which was looked upon as the true representative of the god. It was to this symbol, jealously hidden from all but the high priest and the king, that the prayers of the faithful were addressed. It has been called a survival from the early fetish worship. Perhaps it was so. But at present we are only concerned with its unfortunate results upon artistic development. His statues being excluded from the place of honour, the sculptor was not, as in Greece, stimulated to combine all the qualities ascribed by the nation to its gods in one supreme effort of his knowledge and skill; he was not raised above himself by the desire to produce a work which might give point to the magnificence of a temple and augment the piety of a race.