Excerpt from Art in Egypt The art of Egypt, like all the rest of its civilisation, is the pro duct of the African soil. If it occasionally took ideas or methods of expression from the peoples with which it was brought into contact by the Pharaohs, its levies were not important enough in the first instance to exercise a durable influence upon its constitution. In a few years, it had so completely assimilated the substance of these as to leave us hardly sensible that any alien influences had interfered, even momentarily, with its ho mogeneity. It was only towards the end, when the race whose mind it had so admirably materialised and translated began to bow beneath the weight of over fifty centuries of existence, that it too declined, lacking strength to defend its superannuated traditions successfully against the new conceptions of beauty set before it by younger races. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.