It is not without reason that these objects are called perfume ladles. The Egyptians used them, in fact, for making either essences, pomades, or the various coloured pigments with which both men and women painted the cheeks, lips, eyelids and underneath the eyes, the nails and palms of the hand. The form and decoration vary in accordance with the epochs. At the time of the Ramessides, between the fourteenth and twelfth centuries B.C., fashion introduced Syrian manufactures into Egypt; later, under the Bubastis and under the Ethiopian kings of the XXVth Dynasty, some Chaldæan or Ninevite manufactures came in. The five ladles illustrated here are purely Egyptian in origin and style. The designs were generally borrowed from the fauna and flora of the valley. The first has by way of handle a young girl lost among the lotuses, who is gathering a bud; a tuft of stems from which two full-blown flowers escape attach the handle to the bowl, the oval of which has its rounded part outside and the point inside. In the second, the young girl is framed by two stems of lotus flowers and papyrus, and walks along playing a long-handled guitar. The next ladle substitutes a bearer of offerings for the musician, and the fourth has the musician standing on a boat sailing among the reeds. The last takes the form of a slave, half bent under an enormous sack. Nothing could be better than the general design of the decoration. The artisans brought as much conscience and skill to its execution as the sculptors gave to their colossal statues. The physiognomy and age of the four young girls are well characterized. The girl who plucks the lotuses is an ingénue: that state is shown by her carefully plaited hair and her pleated skirt. Theban ladies wore long skirts, and this is only turned up high to facilitate walking among the reeds without soiling its edges. The two musicians, on the contrary, belong to the lower class; one has only a belt round her hips, the other a short petticoat, carelessly fastened. The bearer of offerings has the tress of hair falling over the ear, as was the custom with children, and her belt is her sole garment. She is one of the slender, slim young girls of whom many may be seen among the fellahs on the banks of the Nile, and her nudity does not prevent her from belonging to a respectable family: children of both sexes only began to wear clothes at the age of puberty. Lastly, the slave, with his thick lips, flattened nose, bestial jaw, low forehead, sugar-loaf head, is evidently a caricature of a foreign prisoner; the brutish, conscientious way in which he lifts his heavy burden, the angular prominences of the body, the type of the head, the arrangement of the different parts, remind us of the general aspect of some terra-cotta grotesques that come from Asia Minor.

All the details of nature grouped round and framing the principal subject, the exact form of the flowers and leaves, the species of the birds, are very accurate, and sometimes betray wit. Of the three ducks that the bearer of offerings has tied by their claws, and which hang over her arm, two are resigned to their fate and go swinging along, the neck stretched out, the eye wide open; the third lifts its head up and flutters its wings. The two water-fowl perched on the lotuses listen at ease, the beaks on their crops, to the lute-player who is passing near them; experience has taught them that they need not disturb themselves for songs, and that a young girl is only to be feared if she is armed. In the bas-reliefs, the sight of a bow or a boomerang throws them into confusion, just as to-day that of a gun scatters the crows. The Egyptians knew the habits of the animals who lived in their land, and took pleasure in minutely observing them. Observation became instinctive with them, and they gave a striking air of reality to the least of their productions.

The bowl of the ladles is generally oval. It is edged by a running decoration between two lines, a waving line, or a more or less accentuated denticulation. The cavity made in the slave’s burden is of irregular shape, and the thick border is decorated with lightly carved flowers and foliage. It was a perfume box rather than a ladle, for the little hole in the lower part, near the prisoner’s shoulder, held the hinge of the lid, now lost. The fifth ladle is in the shape of a quadrangular trough. The bottom, set in four rectangular mouldings, is covered with waving lines simulating water; the edges represent the banks of the lake and are covered with aquatic scenes. On the right, amid the flowers and lotus buds, a little personage is catching birds with a net; on the left, another is fishing from a boat. They are both summarily indicated, but are not the less full of life. It is a miniature reproduction on a wooden ladle of the great scenes of fishing and bird-catching which are painted in the tombs and the temples.

The objects are in wonderful preservation. A lid is lost, a lotus branch is broken behind the girl who is gathering flowers, one of the feet of the bearer of offerings is missing. Otherwise they are intact, and might have just come from the hands of the craftsman. The wood is of a very fine grain, marvellously adapted to the needs of the chisel. It has never been painted, but has become darkened with time. The original colour must have been the golden yellow seen in the cracks of some pieces of thin wood found in the tombs. None of the ladles show any signs of wear: they seem to have been deposited new in the tomb near the dead person, who preserved them new until our day. Like the rest of the funerary equipment, they were intended for use in the other world. The lists of offerings mention antimony powder and green paint among the things sent to the double on festival days: the perfume ladles and boxes were as necessary in the tomb as they had been on earth.

I do not think that any survive which we can with certainty attribute to the time of the Pyramids: but the bas-reliefs of the Memphian tombs show us the joiners at work, and do not allow us to doubt that the trade in small wooden objects was very flourishing at that period. Under the great Theban Dynasties, Egypt exported them by thousands; imitated in Phœnicia, or even transported directly by the Phœnicians to the Mediterranean coasts, they transmitted the forms of Oriental art to the West. It is probable that Theban production—the only one known to us by dated monuments found in the tombs—entirely ceased, or at least became almost insignificant, when the greatness of Thebes declined from the tenth century B.C. They were still manufactured at Memphis and in the important cities of the Delta until the Ptolemies and the Cæsars. Recent specimens are somewhat rare, and present considerable differences from those of Theban manufacture. As it was exactly this Memphian art that almost exclusively supplied the Phœnician market from the time of Sheshonq, it is vexing that examples are not more abundant: as we do not possess sufficient, we cannot accurately judge what their influence was on the arts of the Mediterranean.

The five objects I have been discussing come from the Salt collection. The Theban tombs where they were found were exploited and emptied at the beginning of the nineteenth century by collectors and dealers; it is difficult to find any like them in Egypt now, and those that are discovered are very inferior to these in delicacy and quality.