As Alexandria grew, Naucratis declined. In the troubled times of the Nectanebi the city had rather shrunk than increased, and had suffered from some hostile violence, of which traces still remain. Despite the efforts of Ptolemy Philadelphus to restore the place, it never again flourished. A fragmentary papyrus proves that it retained under the Greek kings its municipal organization, under magistrates called Tiμoúxoi, remaining a free Greek community. About the third century of our era, after giving a home to some notable men of letters, -Philistus, Proclus, Athenæus, and Julius Pollux-Naucratis ceased to exist. Since then the site, one of the coolest, healthiest, and pleasantest in Egypt, has been tenanted by none but scattered Copts and companies of agricultural Arabs.

Egypt was indeed fortunate in being assigned, when Alexander's flimsy empire fell to pieces, to Ptolemy, son of Lagus, the gentlest and wisest of the Macedonian generals, a man who understood, while bringing fresh life into the administration, the religion, and the social condition of Egypt, how to avoid shocking the sensibilities of the conservative people of the land.

In religion, we find under the Ptolemaic kings a process of syncretism. The resemblance, which had not escaped Herodotus, of the worship of Isis to that of the Greek Demeter, made it easy that she should retain her place at the head of the pantheon of Egypt. But her consort Osiris gradually recedes into the background before a new deity, Serapis, whose worship was introduced into the country by Ptolemy in consequence of a dream. Serapis took his place beside Isis, and the other Egyptian gods, Anubis, Harpocrates, and the like, sank into mere satellites of the supreme pair, into whose worship more and more of symbolism and of mysticism entered, until the Egyptian religion seemed to the pagans of the third century of our era no unworthy rival of Christianity. But the state religion of Egypt in Hellenistic times was less the cult of Isis and Serapis than that of the kingly race. According to the tales of the priests, all the gods of Egypt, from Osiris downwards, had been originally successive kings of the country; it was therefore not difficult, especially since the Libyan Ammon guaranteed Alexander's divine parentage, to raise him also from the rank of king to that of god. The worship of the Macedonian hero and his Greek successors became the central worship of Egypt, and not only united Macedonian, Greek, and Egyptian in a common litany, but served to give religious sanction to the power of the reigning dynasty.

As kings, the Ptolemies stepped into the customs and the honours

honours of the Pharaohs. This was natural, since among the Greeks there was no precedent for such relations as existed in the East between sovereigns and subjects. Alexander did indeed for a short time assume the position of a Persian king of kings, and in some part of the station which he thus claimed most of his successors tried to imitate him. But probably the precedents of the Persian court had less effect in Egypt than in Syria or even Macedon. Of course the relation of the king to his Greek subjects and to his Egyptian subjects would not be the same. To the former he would be a countryman in high station; to the latter, an earthly god. From the facts of archæology we may illustrate this distinction. When on the walls of an Egyptian temple one of the Ptolemaic dynasty is depicted as engaged in religious or political observance, he is represented, as were the older monarchs of the land, in Egyptian dress, in conventional attitude, with the inexpressive features of an abstraction, not of a person. When on their silver coins, struck for the use of Greek commerce, the portraits of the Ptolemies appear, they appear as men, idealized indeed to some degree, but still as men, liable to the accidents and diseases of humanity. On the bronze coins struck under Ptolemaic rule, mostly for the use of the Egyptians themselves, we have usually no portrait at all, but the effigy of a deity.

Something, however, was changed even in the government of the native Egyptian population. Writers on the Ptolemaic constitution of Egypt attach great importance to the establishment of Boards of Judges who moved in circuit into the different districts of Egypt. Hitherto the Courts of Justice had had their fixed seats in the great cities; and the peasantry being, like all peasant cultivators, very litigious, had flocked into the towns with their causes, and waited for long periods until they could be attended to. We are told that the result was that much of the fertile land of Egypt remained for considerable periods untilled. Instead of abolishing the local courts, the Ptolemaic kings strove in some degree to supersede them by providing Boards of Chrematistæ, who moved among the people, vested directly by the King with a portion of his authority, and responsible to him alone. Thus cheaper and speedier justice was made accessible to the peasantry. But in Ptolemaic as in Pharaonic Egypt, the King was practically an autocrat, whose rescripts were law, and whose officers held power not a moment longer than they retained his favour. În Ptolemaic as in Pharaonic Egypt, the nome or district was the unit of government; probably the hierarchy of officials in the nome was not much altered.

But

But although the political constitution of Egypt was not greatly altered when the land fell into Greek hands, yet in many respects great changes took place. The mere fact, that Egypt took its place among a family of Hellenistic nations, instead of claiming as of old a proud isolation, must have had a great effect on the trade, the manufactures, and the customs of the country. To begin with trade. Under the native kings Egypt had scarcely any external trade, and trade could scarcely spring up during the wars with Persia. But under the Ptolemies, intercourse between Egypt and Sicily, Syria, or Greece, would naturally and necessarily rapidly advance. Egypt produced manufactured goods which were everywhere in demand: fine linen, ivory, porcelain, notably that papyrus, which Egypt alone produced and which was necessary to the growing trade in manuscripts. Artificial barriers being once removed, enterprising traders of Corinth and Tarentum, Ephesus and Rhodes, would naturally seek these goods in Egypt, bringing in return whatever of most attractive their own countries had to offer. It seems probable that the subjects of the Ptolemies seldom or never had the courage to sail direct down the Red Sea to India. In Roman times this voyage became not unusual, but at an earlier time the Indian trade was principally in the hands of the Arabs of Yemen and of the Persian Gulf. Nevertheless the commerce of Egypt under the Ptolemies spread eastwards as well as westwards. The important towns of Arsinoë and Berenice arose on the Red Sea as emporia of the Arabian trade. And as always happens when Egypt is in vigorous hands, the limits of Egyptian rule and commerce were pushed further and further up the Nile. The influx into Alexandria and Memphis of a crowd of Greek architects, artists, and artizans, could not fail to produce movement in that stream of art which had in Egypt long remained all but stagnant. A wealthy Greek court and self-indulgent Greek satraps had to be supplied with articles of luxury, which would not offend them by hieratic stiffness or bear the impress of a religion which they half despised. That the Egyptians responded to the demand we know; the best proof is to be found in reading the extraordinary account in Athenæus of the pomp of Ptolemy Philadelphus. We there not merely hear of a display of wealth such as was perhaps never rivalled, of mountains of gold and silver, but also find precious indications of a new departure in Greek art, which seems on that occasion to have borrowed something from the abstract tendencies of Egyptian thought. There were statues not merely of gods and kings, but of a multitude of cities, and even personifications of qualities such as Aretê, valour, and of spaces of time such as the

year

year and pentetêris. Such abstractions are not to be found in Greek art in its best period, nor are they in the spirit of Greek art at all; but they mark the new age and the progressive amalgamation of Greek and Egyptian nationalities and ideas under the just and benign rule of the earlier Ptolemies.

If we may trust the somewhat over-coloured and flighty panegyrics which have come down to us, the material progress of Egypt under Ptolemy Philadelphus was most wonderful. We read, though we cannot for a moment trust the figures of Appian, that in his reign Egypt possessed an army of 200,000 foot soldiers and 40,000 horsemen, 300 elephants and 2000 chariots of war. The fleet at the same period is said to have included 1500 large vessels, some of them with twenty or thirty banks of oars. Allowing for exaggeration, we must suppose that Egypt was then more powerful than it had been since the days of Rameses. The number of towns in Egypt under the early Ptolemies is given by some writers as over 30,000.

But far more noble, and far more durable in its effects than any mere material expansion, was the rise at Alexandria of a great literary and scientific school. Among the scholiasts on the great poets and prose-writers of Greece there was no doubt much pedantry, but a literature which was adorned by the writings of Theocritus, and Bion, and Callimachus, cannot be despised. And to our days all children are trained to mental accuracy by the writings of an Alexandrian professor of mathematics, Euclid. A large part of the thoughts which dominate the world's views in philosophy, religion, and science, saw the light first in Alexandria. But if it were our intention to do justice to the glories of that illustrious city, it would claim not the last page of an article, but a volume.

We have introduced the Greeks as they made their first appearance in Egypt as mail-clad warriors from over the sea, and we have followed their career until from being the hired protectors of the Egyptians, they became their masters. The later relations between Egypt on the one side, and Syria, Athens, and Rome on the other, would form a subject not less interesting, but beyond our compass. Egypt, with Alexandria as its capital, plays a great part in the drama of history; Egypt, with Naucratis as its link with the outer world, can form only a dim background to the splendour of the later fame of the country. It is therefore the more welcome, when excavation helps us to clear away some of the mist, which envelopes the earliest of the Greek settlements in Egypt, and enables us more clearly to understand under what conditions it existed and what were its relations to Greece and to Egypt.

ART

ART. IV.-1. The Pictorial Arts of Japan. By William Anderson, F.R.C.S. London, 1886.

2. Descriptive and Historical Catalogue of a Collection of Chinese and Japanese Pictures in the British Museum. Published by order of the Trustees. By William Anderson, F.R.C.S. London, 1886.

3. The Ornamental Arts of Japan. By George Ashdown Audsley. London, 1886.

TP to the present time we have scarcely learned to regard

of the ancient but now almost extinct art of China, and as a memorial of the aesthetic tendencies of the larger section of the Turanian race, the subject is not only one of much archæological and anthropological interest, but it contains much that will delight and something that will instruct connoisseurs of all countries. The ornamental arts of Japan in general have been gorgeously and profusely illustrated in the splendid work of Mr. Audsley, mentioned above; the writings of Franks, Bing, and Brinkley, have given us perhaps all that it is important to know in connection with Japanese ceramics, and we have had abundant opportunities of studying the glyptic abilities of the people through Mr. Gonse's work, 'L'Art Japonais,' and more directly in the exquisite workmanship of the toggles and sword-guards accumulated by the collectors of our own country and of France. It is but yesterday, however, that the student grasped the fact, that the Land of the Reedy Moors' possessed its schools of painting, and its great masters of the brush, at a period when Europe was in a state of pictorial barbarism. The earliest information published in any Western language upon this subject came from a countryman of our own, Mr. William Anderson, formerly Medical Officer to the British Legation in Tokio, who published a paper in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan' for 1878, in which he traced the history of the art, through the Coreans and Chinese, to its latest development under the naturalists and industrial draughtsmen of the present century. Three years later, M. Louis Gonse devoted one of the sections of his beautiful work to a second outline, based on notes supplied by a well-known native expert, M. Wakai, but did not add materially to the facts already ascertained by the personal researches of his predecessor. During this time Mr. Anderson was placing in form his more matured knowledge, and he has now given us in his catalogue of the collection of Japanese pictures in the British Museum, and his magnificent work upon the Pictorial Arts of Japan, a Vol. 164.-No. 327. comprehensive

H