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288 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. about him. It is not without reason, therefore, that some have found in the Egyptian bas-rehef, the origin, the first rough sketch, of those landscapes of which Hellenistic, or as some would say, Alexandrian, art was so fond. One of the most famous of these is the Palestr^ina mosaic, which presents us with an Egyptian landscape during the inundation ; its buildings, its animals, and the curious scenes caused by the rising Nile, are rendered with great vivacity.^ § 8. Gems. A highly civilized society like that of Egypt even in the days of the Ancient Empire, must have felt the necessity for some kind of seal. The names and images engraved upon rings must have been used as siQ:natures even at that earlv date. We know that from that time forward the impressions thus made upon wax and clay were employed in business and other transactions. No engraved stones have come down to us from the early dynasties, and yet their production must have been easy enough to those who carved the diorite statue of Chephren. Under the first Theban Empire, the Egyptians practised the cutting of amethysts, cornelians, garnets, jasper, lapis-lazuli, green-spar and white feld- spar, obsidian, serpentine, steatite, rock crystal, red quartz, sardonyx, &c.^ We do not know whether those early workmen employed the lapidary's wheel or not,-^ but we may safely say that they produced some of the finest works of the kind which are known to us. The annexed Illustration of one of the rarest treasures of the Egyptian collection in the Louvre, will bear out our words (Fig. 241). " A gold ring with a movable square stone, a sardonyx, upon which a personage seated before an altar is engraved with extra- ^ M. Maspero was the first to start this theory in his paper entitled Zcs reintures des Tcviheaux Eoyptiens et la Mosa'ique de Palestrine. - Birch, Guide to (British) Miiseiiin. pp. 70-74. — Pucrret, Catalogue de la Salle Histo}-ique,^o'a. 457, ^^(). passi/ii. ^ M. Soldi remarks, in connection with the Mexicans, that they managed to cut the hardest rocks and to engrave finely upon the emerald with nothing but bronze tools. Prescott and Humboldt bear witness to the same fact. The Peruvians also succeeded in piercing emeralds without iron. Their instrument is said to have been the pointed leaf of a wild plantain, used witl; fine sand and water. With such a tool the one condition of success was time {Lcs Arts Afccomuis, pp. 352-359).