The next step was the carving the intaglios or the reliefs, or modelling the stucco applications, after which, in some of the tombs, plain unbroken colour was applied. But even this approach to painting arose from the desire of distinguishing objects, as tribute of gold from tribute of silver, prisoners of white, tawny, or black nations, and so on. But nothing like a picture, as we understand the word, has ever been found; nothing displaying a knowledge of light and shadow, perspective either lineal or aërial, nothing which by means of colour and tint imitates nature: nor have we the name of any Egyptian painter in the annals of art. Under some of the Ptolemys, artists from Greece visited the court of the Grecian kings; and doubtless the merchants of Alexandria may have been permitted to possess Greek pictures; but the Ptolemys became Egyptians, and adopted the hieroglyphic manner of recording their acts and lives; and until the Christian hermits plastered over the mystic figures of the Egyptian priests, that they might without pollution erect their simple altars within the shelter of the abandoned temples, no change appears to have taken place with regard to the practice of the arts in Egypt. It was reserved for the followers of Mahomet, who abhorred statuary and painting, to introduce a gay and florid architecture among the severe palaces and tombs of the children of Misraim, to use their temples as quarries for building materials, and to burn their statues for lime[32]. Egypt, therefore, though once excelling in architecture and religious sculpture, knowing the use of colour, and conferring innumerable benefits on other countries in most of the arts of design, has never herself been the country of painting. _Extract of a Letter from_ MR. CLIFT _to_ MRS. CALLCOTT. _November 1835._ I have been present, and assisted in the opening of several mummies, in which, although there was a general resemblance in the manner, yet there were palpable differences too, arising probably from difference of person, time, and price; but in none of them was there any painting whatever on the inner linen wrappings: they appear to differ chiefly in the greater or less care taken according to the price; some being much more laboriously and carefully prepared than others. Raspe may have been right in the particular to which you allude, of the inner bandages being painted, if he has not mistaken the inner coffin for bandaging: as Mr. Pettigrew in his late quarto volume on Mummies, has given a three-quarter face portrait, which I think he describes as having been found on the surface of the immediate wrappers of the body _within_ the second coffin of a specimen in the British Museum, which I have not seen; and he has, or had, the head of a supposed female mummy, which had the features of a face and head-dress outlined upon the exterior wrapper of the body, but I have seen no other example.