Mr. Dawson, the treasurer of the Egyptian Exploration Society, has
done a further service to those who are interested in Egyptian antiquities by translating Professor Capart's masterly lectures on the main principles of Egyptian art. Years ago Professor Flinders Petrie wrote a little book on somewhat similar lines, which must have introduced many readers to a fascinating subject. Profbssor Capart has drawn freely on the numerous accounts of modern spade- work in Egypt. The pity is that his book could not be much more fully illustrated. There are, it is true, sixty interesting photographs and drawings, but Professor Capart's lectures cannot be thoroughly understood unless one has at hand the very numerous plates—scattered through many costly books—to which he refers. His chapter on the conventions of the Egyptian artist is particularly good. We must commend, too, the chapter on Egyptian artistic ideas, with its warning that the paintings in a tomb did not necessarily represent the owner's life but were often general- ized scenes in a happy existence taken from a pattern book, like funeral monuments of our own day.
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