personages of the ancient world. "The first thing that strikes us," writes Professor Flinders Petrie, "is the enormous driving-power of the man, the ruling nature which it seems impossible to resist, the determination which is above all constraint and all
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opposition. As far as force of will goes, the strongest characters in history would look pliable in this presence. . . . There is no face quite parallel to this in all the portraits that we know,—Egyptian, Greek, Roman, or modern."
To some king of this same family of pyramid builders is also ascribed, by some authorities, the sculpture of the gigantic human-headed Sphinx at the foot of the Great Pyramid.
These sepulchral monuments, for the pyramids were the tombs of the Pharaohs who constructed them (sec. 40), and the great Sphinx are the most venerable memorials of the early world that have been preserved to us. Although standing so far back in the gray dawn of the historic morning, they mark not the beginning but in some respects the perfection of Egyptian art. They speak of long periods of human life, of ages of growth and experience, lying behind the era they represent. It is this vast and mysterious background that impresses us even more than these giant forms cast up against it.
