Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/76

54 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. and 4f inches thick.^ After the commencement of the Theban epoch they were often stamped with the royal oval — as the Roman bricks had the names of the consuls impressed upon them — and thus they have preserved the dates at which the buildings of which they form part were erected (Fig. 32,).'^ We see, then, that the Egyptians had no lack of excellent building materials of a lapidary kind. On the other hand, they were very poorly provided with good timber. Before the conquest of Syria they must have been almost entirely confined to their indigenous woods. The best of these were the Acacia nilotica, or gum acacia, and the Acacia lebhak, but neither of these trees furnished beams of any size. Sycamore wood was too soft ; its root alone being hard enough for use.^ And yet in default of better wood it was sometimes employed. The same may be said of the date palm, whose trunk furnished posts and rafters, and, at times, very poor flooring planks. During the hey-day of Theban supremacy, the timber for such buildings as the pavilion at Medinet-Abou must have been brought from Syria at great cost. The Theban princes, like those of Nineveh in later times, no doubt caused the Phoenicians, who were their vassals, to thin the cedar forests of Lebanon for their benefit. In structures of less importance carpenters and joiners had to do as best they could with the timber furnished by their own country. The difficulty which they experienced in procuring good planks explains to some extent the care which they lavished upon their woodwork. They contrived, by an elaborate system of " parquetting," of combining upright and horizontal strips with ornamental members, to avoid the waste of even the smallest piece of material. In some ways this work resembles the ceilings, doorways, and panels of a Fig. 33. — Brick stamped v ith the royal ovals ; from Prisse. 1 Prisse, Histoire de V Art Agyptien, letter-press, p. i79- 2 Lepsius {Denkmceler, part iii. plates 7, 2Sa, 26, 39) has reproduced a certain number of these stamped bricks. 3 We do not here refer to the kind of maple which is often erroneously called a sycamore with us, but to a tree of quite a different family and appearance, the Ficus Sycomorus of Linnaeus.