We have only to examine in any of our museums the statues of the Memphite and Theban periods respectively, to see the contrast between the individuals represented in them as far as regards stature and appearance. Some members of the courts of the Ramessides stand out as genuine Semites notwithstanding the disguise of their Egyptian names; and in the times of Kheops and Usirtasen they would have been regarded as barbarians. Many of them exhibit on their faces a blending of the distinctive features of one or other of the predominant Oriental races of the time. Additional evidence of a mixture of races is forthcoming when we examine with an unbiased mind the mummies of the period, and the complexity of the new elements introduced among the people by the political movements of the later centuries is thus strongly confirmed. The new-comers had all been absorbed and assimilated by the country, but the generations which arose from this continual cross-breeding, while representing externally the Egyptians of older epochs, in manners, language, and religion, were at bottom something different, and the difference became the more accentuated as the foreign elements increased. The people were thus gradually divested of the character which had distinguished them before the conquest of Syria; the dispositions and defects imported from without counteracted to such an extent their own native dispositions and defects that all marks of individuality were effaced and nullified. The race tended to become more and more what it long continued to be afterwards,--a lifeless and inert mass, without individual energy--endowed, it is true, with patience, endurance, cheerfulness of temperament, and good nature, but with little power of self-government, and thus forced to submit to foreign masters who made use of it and oppressed it without pity.