They are, as a fact, plans, but plans made upon a very different principle from those of our day. Certain elements, such as walls, are indicated by simple lines varying in thickness, just as they might be in a modern plan, giving such a result as would be obtained by a horizontal section. But this is the exception. The houses, the trees, and everything with any considerable height, are shown in projection, as they might appear to the eye of a bird flying over them if they had been overthrown by some considerate earthquake, which had laid them flat without doing them any other injury. As a rule all objects so treated are projected in one and the same direction, but here and there exceptions to this are found. In a country villa figured upon one of the tombs at Thebes (Fig. 3), one row of trees, that upon the right, is projected at right angles to all the others. The reason for this change in the artist's system is easily seen. Unless he had placed his trees in the fashion shown in the cut, he would not have been able to give a true idea of their number and of the shade which they were calculated to afford. [Illustration: FIG. 3.--Egyptian plan of a villa; from Wilkinson, vol. i. p. 377.] The process which we have just described is the dominant process in Egyptian figuration. Here and there, as in Fig. 1, it is combined with the vertical section. This combination is conspicuous in the plan found at Tell-el-Amarna, from which we have restored the larger of the two villas which we illustrate farther on. In this plan, as in the case of the Theban house figured on page 3, the artist has been careful to show that there was no want of provision in the house; the wall of the store-room is omitted, and the interior, with its rows of amphoræ, is thrown open to our inspection. No scale is given in any of these plans, so that we are unable to determine either the extent of ground occupied by the buildings and their annexes, or their absolute height. But spaces and heights seem to have been kept in just proportion. The Egyptian draughtsman was prepared for the execution of such a task by education and the traditions of his art, and his eye seems to have been trustworthy. Accustomed as we are to accuracy and exactitude in such matters, these Egyptian plans disconcert us at first by their mixture of conscience and carelessness, artlessness and skill, by their simultaneous employment of methods which are contradictory in principle. In the end, however, we arrive at a complete understanding with the Egyptian draughtsman, and we are enabled to transcribe into our own language that which he has painfully written with the limited means at his command. In the two restorations of an Egyptian house which we have attempted, there is no arrangement of any importance that is not to be found in the original plan. § 2. _The Palace._