Their character may be said to be threefold. The imitation almost of mountains in the pyramids, the rock-cut tombs, and the architecture proper, which is columnar in its most stupendous form, and whose greatest remaining monument is the mighty Hall of Karnac, with its hundred and thirty columns, perhaps the most impressive of all the works of antiquity. All these were accompanied by painting and sculpture of a highly mythic but most marked and characteristic kind. An art like this, existing in full perfection in its ancient monuments, and also as a still living art, side by side with the rise of Grecian architecture, could not fail to exercise some influence upon it; yet the evidences of that influence are far from being clear. The genius of the two peoples was absolutely distinct, and Egypt was already a conquered nation while Greece was making its early strides towards fame. They were, too, of wholly different races, so that, though the young nation--during those brilliant strivings which led to its surpassing all races of men in its culture--was familiar with Egypt, and must have looked with wonder at its almost appalling structures, it is, after all, but little that we can trace of actual imitation, and that, strangely enough, not of the productions of its living art, but of a phase which had been extinct fully a thousand years. The inner and earliest sanctuaries at Karnac, and an obscure rock-cut tomb at Beni Hassan, contain pillars to which we trace some resemblance in the Grecian Doric, but whether that resemblance was intentional or accidental no one can say. Curiously, the tomb at Beni Hassan evinces proof of the imitation of timber construction, which gives it an additional alliance with the Doric; but can we conceive of a new art, founded on wood construction, being imitated from an art of a thousand years back, which chanced to evince the same conditions? As reasonable would it be for timber constructors in our own colonies to make pilgrimages to Anglo-Saxon churches which happen to suggest a timber prototype, in search of types for their new structures. More reasonable, however, it may be to suppose that the latest type of Greek art, the Corinthian capital, may have been suggested by the foliated and bellshaped capitals of Egyptian columns. Passing, for a moment, from the Nile to the Tigris, we find buried under the Assyrian mounds an architecture as different as possible from the Greek, yet containing a few almost accidental foreshadowings of some of its details. This architecture seems, however, to have influenced firstly that of Babylon (now almost wholly lost), and subsequently that of the Persian monarchy, which brings us again in contact with the Greeks.