Their religion also appears to have deadened their ambition to reach a higher excellence. There were two periods in their art history. In studying the works belonging to the first, the observer will frequently be impressed by the desire evinced to follow the forms offered by nature for imitation. Such is the most striking characteristic of what may be called the first school. It aimed at the reproduction of natural forms in the most literal manner. Afterward, when the emblematic school took its rise, the forms were still those of nature, with a religious or spiritual significance superadded. The idea is evidently fatal to art, that it can climb to nothing higher than the figure symbolical of a god. In their efforts toward the production of what was graceful and beautiful, the Egyptians are not, however, to be despised. Before foreign influences made themselves felt, the Egyptian forms were simple, and frequently displayed ideas of beauty which, if ruder than those of the Greeks, are independent. The Egyptians were necessarily original. They had no predecessors whose works they could copy; and in appealing to nature for models, they took the only course open to them. From their originality the Greeks borrowed and improved upon their models, and it is in this view of its being a starting-point for subsequent art that Egyptian pottery demands careful study. [Illustration: Fig. 30.--Foreign Captives making Bricks in Egypt. 1, Man returning from carrying load; 2, 7, and 10 carry the clay, after it has been dug by 9, 11, 12, and 13, and throw it down at 7 and _j_, for the brickmakers, 8 and 16; 4 and 5 carry them away to the drying-place or furnace; 3 and 6 are taskmasters; 14 and 15 are carrying water from the tank, _h_. At _c_ and _a_ are inscriptions to the effect that the bricks were so made for the Temple of Amun-Ra, at Thebes.] It is indispensable, in order to understand the highest forms of the art in Egypt, that something should be known of its religion. In that strange land we find an answer--possibly the first--to the question, “The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills, and the plains-- Are not these, O soul, the vision of Him who reigns?”