goldsmiths. The sculptors and the painters were grouped into guilds;*
many of them spent their days in the tombs they were decorating, while
others had their workshops above-ground, probably very like those of our
modern monumental masons.

* We gather this from the inscriptions which give us the
various titles of the sculptors, draughtsmen, or workmen,
but I have been unable to make out the respective positions
held by these different persons.

They kept at the disposal of their needy customers an assortment of
ready-made statues and stelæ, votive tablets to Osiris, Anubis, and
other Theban gods and goddesses, singly or combined. The name of the
deceased and the enumeration of the members of his family were left
blank, and were inserted after purchase in the spaces reserved for the
purpose.*

* I succeeded in collecting at the Boulak Museum a
considerable number of these unfinished statues and stelæ,
coming from the workshops of the necropolis.

These artisans made the greater part of their livelihood by means of
these epitaphs, and the majority thought only of selling as many of them
as they could; some few, however, devoted themselves to work of a higher
kind. Sculpture had reached a high degree of development under the
Thûtmoses and the Ramses, and the art of depicting scenes in bas-relief
had been brought to a perfection hitherto unknown. This will be easily
seen by comparing the pictures in the old mastabas, such as those of Ti
or Phtahhotpû, with the finest parts of the temples of Qurneh, Abydos,
Karnak, Deîr el-Baharî, or with the scenes in the tombs of Seti I. and