explanation which the excavator gives of these ashes, that the body
and the offerings were burned in the closed grave, hardly deserves
consideration. In any case, the grave has been robbed and destroyed.
That is shown by the fact that many pieces of funeral furniture, which
originally could only have been put in the central rooms, were found
partly broken in the outside rooms, or on the side toward the fields,
the side most exposed to the attack of grave robbers.

The assumption that the grave has been robbed and intentionally
destroyed agrees entirely with the fact that all the more valuable
objects found in the grave were in fragments. But, fragmentary as they
are, they are sufficient to give us a good idea of the art of the
first period of the Egyptian kingdom, a period which is now most
generally estimated to be five and a half millenniums before the
present day (3600 B.C.) The skill with which ivory carving was done in
that early time is indeed amazing. Reclining lions, hunting dogs and
fish are so skillfully reproduced that one asks how many centuries of
development must have preceded before the art of carving reached this
perfection. A number of feet taken from the legs of small chairs and
other similar furniture, and made in imitation of bulls' legs, show
such a fixity of style and at the same time such a freedom of
execution, that no archæologist, without the report of the excavator,
would dare to proclaim them the oldest dated works of Egyptian art.
But it was not only in carving ivory, which is easy to work, that the
Egyptian artists showed their skill. They also make bowls and vases of
diorite and porphyry with the same success; and the forms presented by
the smaller ivory vases are also to be found in vases made of those
refractory stones. Further, the vases made of stone present not merely
such forms as might be made by turning or boring, but there are also
bowls with ribs which are as finely polished as the turned bowls. The