United States or American Samoa ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


"Of what use are the bassi-relievi of the temples and the palaces which represent me armed with a scourge and a sceptre, driving my war chariot over bodies, and dragging by their hair subject nations, if I am obliged to yield to the spells of a foreign magician, if the gods to whom I have raised so many vast temples, built for eternity, do not defend me against the unknown god of that low race?

"It happened one day," says he, "that several young artists and myself were occupied in designing from the bassi-relievi of the Arch of Titus, when Roos passing by, was particularly struck with some picturesque object which caught his attention, and he requested one of the students to accommodate him with a crayon and paper.

It might have been thought that the artist who had carved the decorative bassi-relievi of the rooms in the harem had taken these graceful groups as models; but the Pharaoh could not have looked with a colder glance at the designs cut in the stone.

I seemed to see pass by the zones of painted bassi-relievi representing agricultural scenes which occasionally formed part of the decoration of the halls of Egyptian tombs. Here and there rose villages or farms, the lines of whose sloping, earth-gray walls recalled the substructures of antique temples.