In this case, I imagine that it will not enter any one’s mind to dispute that the bracelets of Ramses II and the chalice of Taouasrît are Egyptian pure and simple. The two gold vases and the two silver jugs present no foreign characteristic: the gold kid is of the same family as the goats sculptured fifteen or twenty centuries earlier in the Memphian bas-reliefs, standing on their hind legs and nibbling at a bush. The pateræ, it is true, resemble the Phœnician gold and bronze cups so often found in the Euphrates districts and in the lands on the shores of the Mediterranean: but no one has refused to admit that they were imitations of Egyptian models, and perhaps a more impartial examination would lead archæologists to restore some of them at least to Egypt. At any rate, the treasure of Zagazig shows us what those models ought to be: the Phœnicians were not unmindful of them and respected the general arrangement, even if they often modified the detail. One element only in the scenes of the two rows may be exotic: the female sphinx with the strange locks of hair, if we choose to see in her a derivative of the griffin rather than a fantastic deformation of the male sphinx of a former age. But even so, it must not be forgotten that the griffin belongs to the ancient national foundations like the oxen and gazelles, goats, dogs, leopards seen by its side: its presence would only prove--if its form was so characteristic that we could not refuse to believe it an incongruity--that it was borrowed from the arts of Syria or Chaldæa by some artist tired of always using the traditional types of his country. XVIII THREE STATUETTES IN WOOD (_The Louvre_) The three little wooden figures reproduced here are of Theban origin, and represent persons who lived under the conqueror-kings of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties.