the dignity, even of a very great artist, to apply his talent to the poster.
It is clear that the poster is one of the oldest and most obvious forms of advertisement. It is almost impossible to conceive a time in the history of man, once he had learned to express his thoughts in design or in writing, when the idea of the thing did not exist. It must have been an incident of the most crude and ancient of civilizations; even the cave-dweller in the dim and distant past must surely have possessed the essential idea of it. From the cave-dweller to the comparatively complex civilization of the ancient and greater Egypt is a far cry. That the mural inscription, which is obviously the germ of the poster, flourished exceedingly in the Land of the Pharaohs is matter of history. A papyrus is comprised in the collections of the Louvre, which may fairly be described as a poster. It is dated so early as 146 B.C., and deals at length with the escape of two slaves from the city of Alexandria, offering a reward to anybody who should discover their place of retreat. Still more interesting, though less ancient, is an inscription in Greek, discovered in the Temple at Jerusalem, in 1872, by M. Clermont-Gannerau. It was issued during the reign of Herod the Great, and forbids the entry, by foreigners, to certain parts of the Temple on pain of death.
