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Excerpt from Museum of Fine Arts Boston: Part I the Egyptian Casts; Part II Chaldæan and Assyrian Sculpture The art of sculpture in Egypt had its foundation in portraiture. To live after death in the other world, a man's spirit, his ka, his "double," had need of an abiding-place, and for that end his body was embalmed. But embalming evidently did not wholly satisfy the requirements. The body was disfigured and could easily be destroyed; a figure of stone or of wood would be a more durable dwelling, and the larger the number of these figures the greater the chance of the survival of one. Hence in the tombs of the early Egyptian dynasties we find stowed away in recesses in the masonry and carefully walled up for protection numbers of statues in wood and stone, bearing every evidence of being portraits from the life of the men they commemorated, at least in the head and face, - the body generally idealized so far only as to represent it in the prime of life. Few of these figures have found their way to European museums, however, as their discovery is of comparatively recent date; but in the Museum at Gizeh the traveller sees the Egypt of the past rehabilitated: he studies the dress, the forms, the features, and the very expression of the men of thirty centuries before the Christian era, reproduced with no attempt at elegance or flattery, - a blunt, realistic statement of fact. These figures are colored, so that their reproduction by casts is forbidden. The photographs A and B are taken from one of the most celebrated, - a wooden figure, the Sheikh-el-beled, so called. 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