Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/42

20 General History of Europe portraits have never been produced by any age, although they are the earliest in the history of art. The statues of the kings are often superb. In size the most remarkable statue of the Pyramid Age is the Great Sphinx, which stands here in this cemetery of Gizeh. The head is a portrait of Khafre, the king who built the second pyramid of Gizeh. It was carved from a promontory of rock which overlooked the royal city, and is the largest portrait bust ever wrought. III. CIVILIZATION OF THE EMPIRE 30. The Period of the Empire (isso-nso B. c.). We have now seen the many things that the Egyptians had learned to make in the Pyramid Age. Another great age came long after, when about 1500 B.C. the Egyptian Pharaohs built up a huge empire including a large part of Western Asia and extending up to the Fourth Cataract of the Nile (see map, p. 24). The Napoleon of this period was Thutmose III, whose reign began about 1500 B.C. His armies subdued the cities and kingdoms of Western Asia and united them into an empire. He built the first great navy in history. He had many monuments erected in his honor, and one of them, an obelisk, stands in Central Park, New York, today. 31. Thebes and its. Ruins. Under the Empire the chief city was no longer Memphis but Thebes, lying over four hundred miles up the Nile. The temple of Karnak there contains the greatest colonnaded hall ever erected by man. The columns of the central aisle are sixty-nine feet high. The vast capital sur- mounting each of the columns is so large that a group of a hun- dred men could stand on it. Mirrored in the surface of the temple lake this building made a picture of splendor such as the world had never beheld before. The vast battle scenes carved on the temple walls were painted in bright colors. The gigantic statues of the Pharaohs, set up before the temples, were often so large that they rose above the towers of the temple front itself and could be seen for miles around. The sculptors often carved these colossal figures from