Rhind, Alexander Henry: Thebes, its tombs and their tenants, ancient and present (London, 1862)

220 SEPULCHRAL EVIDENCE ON EARLY METALLURGY.

But when the objects were inanimate, when in
actual fact they would have been capable in their
reality of receiving almost any hue, then in represent-
ing such objects, or even trees and other members
of the vegetable world, there is ample proof to
show that a liberal licence was taken, and colours
were used conformably to the decorative idea present
to the artists' minds — an idea defined partly by
the inelastic trammels which shackled Egyptian art,
partly by the limited range of colours which they
seem in the main only to have adopted. Moreover,
with regard to the two very pigments which enter
chiefly into the present inquiry, red and blue, they
were among the few most commonly employed, and
there are numerous instances of their very indeter-
minate use. Nor are such wanting among the very
subjects from which evidence is adduced in the matter
before us. Eor example, the fact has been cited that,
in some of the early tombs around the pyramids of
Geezeh, there is a well known group representing a
man about to slaughter or cut up the carcase of an
animal; and it has been pointed out that the man
appears in the act of sharpening a red knife on a
blue object similar in shape to the modern steel,
whose material, as prescribed by that name, the colour
is held to indicate. But I have remarked, in one of
these same tombs, the identical subject, in which, how-
ever, the steel is red and the knife blue: and the
idea suggests itself from the transposition, whether
the colours might not have been used for the sake;