It will thus be seen that the Egyptians did not carry the art to a very high point. They were, however, successful in creating a foreign demand for the productions of their potteries. From discoveries made in Eastern Greece, Nineveh, and elsewhere, it would appear that the fine pottery ornaments of Egypt were in considerable repute in neighboring countries; and, as we shall hereafter see, Egypt contributed its full share to the furtherance of the art by supplying suggestions and models. [Illustration: Fig. 42.--Egyptian Mummy Figures. Blue or Greenish-blue Enamelled Pottery. (Way Coll., Boston Museum of Fine Arts.)] One important matter remains to be disposed of. It has long been a subject of doubt whether or not Egypt possessed the secret of stanniferous enamel. It has been already intimated that the discovery of the use of tin for a pottery enamel is due to either that country or Assyria. The honor may probably be ascribed to Egypt. In the loan collection of the Metropolitan Museum of New York is a fragment (Fig. 43) of a vase exhibited in the Egyptian section, and referable to a very remote antiquity, covered with what is apparently tin enamel, bearing purple decorations. Should this be the case, then this solitary fragment will settle the matter, and we must believe that the Egyptians possessed this secret of the art four thousand years ago. In that event, the Assyrians probably acquired it from Egypt. The fact supplies us with the means of arriving at a very clear idea of the grand antiquity of that civilization under which a valuable art was practised, to which Europe was a stranger for more than three thousand five hundred years afterward. [Illustration: Fig. 43.--Fragment with White Enamel. (Trumbull-Prime Coll., N. Y. Metrop. Museum.)] It is, as we have seen, long since the art purely its own reached its culmination. The Egypt of the nineteenth century in this respect scarcely suggests that of the Pyramids. If we were to take that country as it appeared at the Philadelphia Exhibition, we would hardly be prepared to look upon its ceramic products as those of a country in which the art has been practised for four thousand years. A few pieces exhibited were of light, slate-colored body, unglazed, and so brittle that dozens were broken in transit. The ornamentation was laid on the bare surface, and was, as a rule, bright to the verge of gaudiness. The greater portion of the painting was the work of an Italian artist resident in Cairo. Some of the red terra-cotta was more satisfactory; but all that can be said in favor of either kind is that it was, in its way, characteristically Egyptian. One specimen of pale green “porcelain” was sent by the Museum at Cairo. The last is mentioned because it represented the farthest point which the Egyptians reached on the way toward a true porcelain. CHAPTER II. ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA.