Egypt seems to have been a glowing hearth of pictorial activity from the Hellenistic age onwards.
Early Christian iconography must have been developed at an active Hellenistic centre. Jerusalem was hardly this, and Palestinian art for the most part must have been an offshoot of that of Alexandria. It is probable that painted rolls and books were the chief sources, from which the types to become familiar in paintings and mosaics were spread abroad.
The codex form of book, which seems at an early time to have become specially associated with Christian literature, was almost certainly an Egyptian innovation. According to Sir Maunde Thompson, codices of vellum, of the third century and earlier, have been found in Egypt, and this form of MS. "was gradually thrusting its way into use in the first centuries of our era. ... The book form was favoured by the early Christians. In the fourth century the struggle between the roll and the codex was finished." Some fine book-bindings, which may even be as early as the sixth century, have lately been found in Egypt. The noble Codex Alexandrinus of the fifth century, now in the British Museum, is an Egyptian book. So also, almost certainly, is the once beautiful, but now almost destroyed, pictured book of Genesis called the Cotton Bible. The writing of this volume is very like that of the Codex Alexandrinus and of a great number of papyrus fragments. It also seems to date from the fifth century, and furthermore its pictures have some affinities with others in an Alexandrian chronicle of the world on papyrus, which has been published by Strzygowski, while they have a closer likeness to other painted books which have been judged to have been produced in Alexandria, such as illuminated volumes of Dioscorides and of Cosmas the traveller, and a roll of Joshua. Many points in the miniatures with which the Cotton Genesis was crowded bear out this view of its origin. Thus, two of those relating to Joseph in Egypt shew a group of pyramids in the background; a third had well-drawn camels; and another the burial of a body wrapped like a mummy. It has been proved by Dr Tikkanen of Helsingfors that this MS. or a duplicate of it, was used by the mosaic workers at St Mark's, Venice, at the end of the twelfth century, for the designs from early Bible history which fill the domes of the narthex. Twenty-six of those relating to the Creation were accurately enlarged copies of as many miniatures from the now terribly injured book, and these subjects. designs of great dignity and grace, can consequently be restored. Other pictures in the volume which relate to Lot, Abraham and Joshua, were again very similar to the series of mosaics executed in Sta Maria Maggiore in Rome about A.D. 440, and, indeed, the types found in the Cotton Genesis seem to have had an almost canonical importance. Their influence can be traced far down in the Middle Ages, and even the Biblical pictures of Raphael still retained some reminiscence of them. One
