The [first plate] represents portion of a hieroglyphical text written on a roll of papyrus which was wrapped up with the mummy of the man whose virtues are recorded on it. As for the exact age and contents of the roll, it is beyond my capacity to say anything definite; but there is a delicacy in the drawing of the figures and in the formation of the letters which seem to indicate a considerable age, probably not less than twelve hundred years B.C. Each column of the writing has to be read from top to bottom, beginning with the first column on the left. It has been said in an earlier page that the hieratic and demotic scripts differed from the hieroglyphic in being written like Hebrew in long horizontal lines from right to left. The difference is, however, merely formal. If we turn the hieroglyphic page half round, so that the right side becomes the bottom, and the left side the top of the page, we can see the inscription run in hieratic fashion from right to left.
[Plate 2] is perhaps more difficult to decipher than Plate 1. We know, however, that the demotic script was used only amongst laymen in matters of business and of money; and this no doubt represents some commercial transaction that took place between 500 and 200 B.C. The demotic was a complex cursive evolved from the hieratic; its invention, or at least its use to any considerable degree, does not appear to have been much antecedent to 600 B.C., and there was little necessity for its continuance after the second century B.C.
It was probably about the beginning of the Christian era that the demotic finally disappeared before the Coptic, an alphabet derived from the Greek, of which [Plate 3] gives an example. The Arabic heading which accompanies the Coptic rubric above the Psalm that begins below (the 118th ριη), is in a hand of the latter part of the fifteenth century. Notwithstanding the lateness of the specimen, the script takes its proper place here as representing a script of the first century.
[Plate 4] is taken from a copy, written on vellum at Nablús, of the Samaritan Pentateuch. Both in language and in letters it represents the old Hebrew of the days of Solomon, long anterior to the time when Ezra introduced from Chaldæa the square characters now called Hebrew; the ancient letters having been preserved by a small remnant in North Palestine. The writing resembles that of the Phœnicians, and the example given on plate 4, notwithstanding its lateness, does not exhibit a very much modified form of the character.
[Plate 5] is from an Abyssinian MS. of the sixteenth century, on the Life of the Virgin. The real origin of the artistic decoration is unmistakable. It is what we call Byzantine, but ought rather to be called Ægypto-Grecian. The people of Abyssinia, who were mainly Southern Arabs or Sabæans, received their instruction in art along with their Christianity a few centuries after the beginning of the era, and they have never abandoned them. As for the writing which appears on the plate, it is in the old Geez or Ethiopic language, and descended from that of the Sabæan people whose monumental inscriptions in Himyaritic language and characters are now attracting considerable interest.
[Plate 6] is from a Greek Gospelbook written on vellum, which was brought to England from Cyprus by Cesnola. The ornamental border at the top is somewhat freer and less stiff in style than those which we find in most of the Byzantine MSS.; and the writing is neater and less negligent than if it had been executed in the eleventh or twelfth century. It slopes a little backwards and has the breathings in their antique form as halves of the letter H. Hence I have assigned it to the latter part of the tenth century.
On [plate 7] I have given a reduction after Westwood of a page from an Irish MS. now in the Archiepiscopal Library at Lambeth. Although it is of comparatively late date (the ninth century), and the writing is the Irish script in its second or wholly minuscule stage, the ornamentation is sufficient to show what Irish work had been and still was. The marvellously elaborate convolutions and interlacements, the dexterous use of colours, the utter absence of gold, and the introduction of grotesque animal figures, are all seen in this plate from the Gospelbook of MacDurnan. (While I write I am reminded of a personal experience which I may be forgiven for setting down in print. When Westwood's great book had come out, I was one day speaking with an English lady of high social position, cultivated and accomplished in many branches of knowledge, to whom after mentioning Westwood I expressed my admiration of what the Irish calligraphers had done in the seventh and eighth centuries, when art was so low in most of the other lands of Europe. The lady listened with patient good-breeding, till I paused, and then said quietly, "I presume that you are yourself an Irishman!" She had evidently mistaken one unfamiliar accent for another, and her remark was a polite criticism upon my credulity or veracity.)
[Plate 21] (which ought to have been inserted in succession to plate 7) reproduces a miniature from a Breviary written about 1150-60 for Isengrim, Abbot of the Benedictine Monastery at Ottenbeuern in Suabia.
The miniature reproduced is a picture of the Ascension, and shows the Saviour standing in an almond-shaped frame, supported and borne aloft by four angels. The Virgin and the Apostles are looking upwards from below, and the picture is enclosed within a square blue border, this being lighted by ornamental fretwork in white. The faces are generally well drawn, and the rapt attention in the eyes of the uplookers is very skilfully depicted. The colours used are blue, green, yellow, red, chesnut, and white. The whole effect is reminiscent of Anglo-Saxon work, and one might easily, at first sight, mistake it for a picture out of an English book of the tenth century. A somewhat similar design of the same subject is found in King Athelstan's Psalter—an Anglo-Saxon MS. of the late ninth century, now in the British Museum; but the Suabian illustration is decidedly inferior in taste and delicacy of treatment. It shows, however, such a kinship that we are inclined to believe in a nearer connexion between German and English art than between German and French Carolingian.
[Plates 8] and [9] reproduce miniatures from two manuscripts of the Latin Bible,—the first page of Genesis in each. The first is either English or Norman work, perhaps rather the latter than the former, and is interesting as affording one of the earliest examples of the border with leaves of the so-called ivy pattern. The writing is a beautiful early gothic of the transition period between the Carolingian round hand and the mediæval square gothic. It is unmistakably Norman, if not Anglo-Norman, but may have been English. If the reds in the tiny miniatures had been a little more pinkish, and the blue a little lighter, we should have had no hesitation in calling it English work. In [plate 9], the writing is somewhat rounder and the ink is paler—showing that the work is neither English nor Norman; and we find in the minute pictures a style of design, both in the figures and the draperies, which reminds us of late classical art. The interlaced pattern in the lowest portion of the ornament is also a survival of the Celtic manner which might be found in Southern France, but which had ceased to be used in English work, except in the decoration of letters. On the plate, the picture is dated "1310-20"; but we may venture to think that it was executed in South-Eastern France about the year 1300.