The inscriptions, then, do little to help us out of our embarrassment, and we are obliged to turn to the style of the vessels and their decoration for a solution to our doubts. The conviction at which we soon arrive after a careful study of their peculiarities is that even those on which Egyptian motives are most numerous and most frankly employed were not made in Egypt. In the first place we remember that the Egyptians do not seem to have made any extensive use of such platters; their libations were poured from vases of a different shape, and the cups sometimes shown in the hands of a Pharaoh always have a foot.[419] Moreover, in the paintings and bas-reliefs of Egypt, where so many cups and vases of every kind are figured, and especially the rich golden vessel that must have occupied such an important place in the royal treasure, we only find the shape in question in a few rare instances.[420] After this general statement we may go into the details. In these the hand of the imitator is everywhere visible; he borrows motives and adapts them to his own habits and tastes. Take as an example the platter to which a double frieze of hieroglyphs gives a peculiarly Egyptian physiognomy (Fig. 215). An Egyptian artist would never employ hieroglyphs in such a position without giving them some real significance, such as the name of a king or deity. Here, on the other hand, an Egyptologist has only to glance at the cartouches to see that their hieroglyphs are brought together at haphazard and that no sense is to be got out of them. This is obvious even by the arrangement of the several characters in the oval without troubling to examine them one by one. They are divided into groups by straight lines, like those of a copy book. The Egyptian scribe never made use of such divisions; he distributed his characters over the field of the oval according to their sense and shape. The arrangement here followed is only to be explained by habits formed in the use of a writing that goes in horizontal lines from left to right or right to left. There is, in fact, nothing Egyptian but the shape of the ovals, and the motive with which they are crowned. The pretended hieroglyphs are nothing but rather clumsily executed pasticcios. And it must be noticed that even this superficial Egyptianism is absent from the centre of the dish. In those Theban ceilings which display such a wealth of various decoration we may find a simple rosette here and there, or rather a flower with four or eight petals, but these petals are always rounded at the end; nowhere do we find anything that can be compared to the great seven-pointed star which is here combined so ingeniously with eight more of the same pattern but of smaller size. On the other hand this motive is to be found on a great number of cups where no reminiscence of Egypt can be traced. The ruling idea is the same as that of the diaper-work in the thresholds from Khorsabad and Nimroud (see Vol. I., Fig. 135).