The case is quite different, however, when we come to the relations between Crete and the great civilization of the Nile Valley. In this case there is, if not abundance, at all events a sufficiency of evidence as to an intercourse which extended through practically the whole duration of the Minoan Empire. For the Early Dynastic period of Egyptian history the evidence is somewhat slight, and the interpretation of it not always certain. When we come to the Middle Kingdom of Egypt--a period contemporaneous with Middle Minoan II. and III.--it becomes both more abundant and more unquestionable in meaning; while with the New Empire (Eighteenth Dynasty) and Late Minoan II. we reach absolutely firm ground, the correspondence of art motives, and the actual proofs of intercourse, especially on the Egyptian side, being indisputable. Our object, then, in this chapter is to exhibit the evidence of the relationship between Crete and Egypt, and to inquire to what conclusion it leads us concerning the dates of the various periods of Minoan history. For the earliest period we are left with somewhat scanty evidence. Professor Petrie has found in some of the First Dynasty graves at Abydos vases of black hand-burnished ware, which are very closely allied, both inform and colour, to the primitive 'bucchero' discovered immediately above the Neolithic deposit in the West Court at Knossos; and he has suggested that, as the pottery is not Egyptian in style, it may have been imported from Crete. On various sites in the palace at Knossos there have been found stone vessels of diorite, syenite, and liparite, exquisitely wrought. Now, such work is eminently characteristic of the Early Egyptian Dynastic period, the artists of that time taking a pride in turning out bowls of these intensely hard stones, wrought sometimes to such a degree of fineness as to be translucent. The chances are against these bowls having been imported in later days, as the taste for them gradually died out in Egypt, and 'no ancient nation had antiquarian tastes till the time of the Saites in Egypt and of the Romans still later.' The stone vessels discovered by Mr. Seager at Mokhlos, though wrought out of beautiful native materials, betray, according to Dr. Evans, the strong influence of protodynastic Egyptian models. Coming down a little farther, to Early Minoan III., there is evidence of Egyptian influence in the fact that the ivory seals of this period seem to derive their motives from the so-called 'button-seals' of the Sixth Egyptian Dynasty. Mr. H. R. Hall believes that the derivation was the other way about. 'It would seem very probable that this decidedly foreign decoration motive was adopted by the Egyptians from the AEgeans about the end of the Old Kingdom (=Early Minoan III.), so that the Egyptian seal designs are copied from those of the Cretan seal-stones, rather than the reverse. Egyptian designs were very ancient, and had the spiral been Egyptian, we should