following language at the end of his fifteenth letter, dated at Thebes.
"It is evident to me, as it must be to all who have thoroughly examined
Egypt or have an accurate knowledge of the Egyptian monuments existing
in Europe, that the arts commenced in Greece by a servile imitation of
the arts in Egypt, much more advanced than is vulgarly believed, at the
period when the Egyptian colonies came in contact with the savage
inhabitants of Attica or the Peloponnesus. Without Egypt, Greece would
probably never have become the classical land of the fine arts. Such is
my entire belief on this great problem. I write these lines almost in
the presence of bas-reliefs which the Egyptians executed, with the most
elegant delicacy of workmanship, seventeen hundred years before the
Christian era. What were the Greeks then doing?"

The sculptures of the monument of El Asaffif are ascertained to be more
than three thousand five hundred years old.




ANCIENT THEBES.


Thebes, an ancient city and capital of Egypt, and the oldest city in the
world, was situated in Upper Egypt, on both sides of the Nile, about two
hundred and sixty miles south of Cairo. Thebes is "the city of a hundred
gates," the theme and admiration of ancient poets and historians, and
the wonder of travelers--"that venerable city," in the language of Dr.
Pocoke, "the date of whose destruction is older than the foundation of
other cities, and the extent of whose ruins, and the immensity of whose
colossal fragments still offer so many astonishing objects, that one is