The two plants which we have mentioned were so specially reverenced by the Egyptians that they constituted them severally into the signs by which the two great divisions of the country were indicated in their writings. The _papyrus_ was the emblem of the Delta, in whose lazy waters it luxuriated, and the lotus that of the Thebaïd.[118] [118] MASPERO, _Histoire Ancienne_, p. 8. Besides this testimony to their importance, the careful descriptions left by the ancient travellers in Egypt, Herodotus and Strabo, also show the estimation in which these two plants were held by the Egyptians; the palm alone could contest their well-earned supremacy. It is easy, then, to understand how the artist and ornamentist were led to make use of their graceful forms. We have already pointed out many instances of such employment, and we are far from underrating its importance, but we have yet to explain the method followed, and the kind and degree of imitation which the Egyptian artist allowed himself. The lotus especially has been found everywhere by writers upon Egypt.[119] The pointed leaves painted upon the lower parts of columns have been recognized as imitations of "those scaly leaves which surround the point where the stem of the lotus, the papyrus, and many other aquatic plants, merges in the root." According to this theory the ligneous stem which rises from a depth beneath the water of, perhaps, six feet, and carries the large open flower at its top, was the prototype of the Egyptian column. The bulbous form with which so many shafts are endowed at the base, would be another feature taken directly from nature. The leaves, properly speaking, which spread around the flower, are found about and below the capital, while the capital itself is nothing else, we are told, than the flower, sometimes fully opened, sometimes while yet in the bud. When the shaft is smooth it represents a single stem, when it is grooved, it means a faggot of stems tied together by a cord. [119] _Description de l'Égypte_; _Hist. Naturelle_, vol. ii. p. 311. _Antiquités_, vol. i. _Description générale de Thèbes_, p. 133: "Who can doubt that they wished to imitate the lotus in its entirety? The shaft of the column is the stem, the capital the flower, and, still more obviously, the lower part of the column seems to us an exact representation of that of the lotus and of plants in general." [Illustration: FIG. 98.--Papyrus plant, drawn in the gardens of the Luxembourg, Paris, by M. Saint-Elme Gautier.]