M. Prisse says:[110] "Most of the fellahs who inhabit the land, formerly Memphis and Thebes, live only from the products of their finds. Constrained to cease from their lucrative researches, they are reduced to the counterfeiting of figurines, amulets and the other objects of art which they formerly found in the earth. Necessity the mother of industry has caused them in a short time to make wonderful progress. Without any practice in the arts, and with the rudest tools, some of the peasants have carved scarabs and beautiful statuettes and ornamented them with hieroglyphic legends. They very well know that cartouches add much value to the antiquities, and they are never in want of copies of them either from the great monuments or the original scarabs. They use in making the copies a limestone of fine and compact grain, soapstone, serpentine and alabaster. The objects made of limestone are daubed with bitumen taken from the mummies, or from the colors taken away from the paintings in the hypogea, finally some are covered uniformly with a brilliant pottery glaze which renders, it is true, the forms rather blurred and not easy to see, but which resembles in a surprising manner, antiquities which the action of fire or of earth, impregnated with saltpetre, have slightly damaged. The feigned hieroglyphs therein are mistaken for those as to which the work has been neglected. Their statuettes recall the figurines of poor ware, which the Ancient Egyptians placed in so great a number in their tombs. In spite of their imperfections, the fellahs have been perfectly successful in deceiving most of the travelers, generally grossly ignorant of antiquities. Hard stones, such as basalt, green jasper, burnt serpentine, green feldspar, chalcedony, cornelian, etc., upon which the rude tools of the fellahs would not have worked, would have become, for the amateurs in antiquities, the only pieces of authentic origin; but the Jews of Cairo, also as rapacious and more able than the Arabs, have engraved with the wheel, scarabs and amulets denuded of legends; and finally have entirely counterfeited them, so that all these little objects are now very much suspected, and their appreciation to-day, demands understanding of the text much more than knowledge of Egyptian art. Not only the tourists, the people of leisure from Europe, who bring back from all the classic lands some antiquities, in place of observation and study, which are not sold; purchase these falsified antiquities, but also people who pride themselves upon having a knowledge of archæology, often buy them. Most of the collections of the Museums of Europe contain, more or less, objects fabricated in our day in Egypt. 'Luxor' says M. Mariette, 'is a centre for fabrications in which scarabs, statuettes and even steles, are imitated with an address which often leads astray the most instructed antiquary.'"