The paintings on the walls of their tombs, and other monuments, suffice to show the attention the early population paid to agricultural pursuits; for there was obviously no higher tribute to the memory of a deceased landowner than to represent him overlooking his labourers in the field, cultivating the soil, or reaping, and carrying, in nets and baskets, the produce to the thrashing floor. In fact, apart from the records of Herodotus, valuable as they undoubtedly are, the monuments furnish a great amount of information, with regard to the state and progress of the arts and sciences among this ancient people. To measure and to calculate the fitting seasons for their various religious ceremonies, they observed, with much accuracy, the courses of the heavenly bodies, especially those of the sun and stars; at the same time keeping a careful registry of their movements, little, if at all, inferior to that of the Chaldæans. But while a practical acquaintance with geometry was a necessity to the men who constructed the Pyramids and the great dams and dykes required for the complete utilizing of the periodical inundations of the Nile, the study of this exact science was still more stimulated by the mechanism necessary to enable them to transport from the quarries the enormous blocks of stone of which the Pyramids and temples were constructed, some of these having to be brought for more than five hundred miles. Such works could not have failed to demand considerable mechanical invention. Nor indeed is this all. Remains still existing show that the Egyptians were well skilled in the use of metals, and in their application to delicate as well as rough work. The paintings in the tombs, and abundant drawings preserved on the Egyptian _papyri_, demonstrate also their knowledge of at least the elementary branches of the Fine Arts; while their colossal statues exhibit great power in the working of sculptures in a very hard and untractable material. [Sidenote: Sesostris.]