It became elaborated under Seti I., with markings upon it, both on a dress of a god and on a throne-cover. And it became degraded into an unintelligible pattern under Ramessu II., when it appears as the dress of the god Amen.
In later times the same pattern was used on columns at Philæ, in an inverted and very corrupt form.
100.—L.D. I. 108.
The other forms of feather pattern shown on the Antef coffin were also found later. But they merge so readily into mere line patterns that it is not likely that they were regarded as feathers in their later use. The V pattern is found on the columns at Tell el Amarna, on belts of the kings (L.D. III. 1), on painted wooden columns (P. [73]), on the harps of Ramessu III. (P. [114]), and many other places.
The use of flowers for ornament is so natural that their occurrence in the earliest times is what might be expected. Yet but few flowers were adopted for decoration. The lotus is far the commonest, after that the papyrus, the daisy, and the convolvulus, together with the vine and palm, almost complete the material of vegetable designs. There is also, however, what may be called a generic flower ornament—the rosette—which is treated so conventionally that it can hardly receive any precise name. Sometimes in the XVIIIth dynasty it is clearly a daisy, very seldom has it the pointed petals of the lotus; and it fluctuates between the geometrical and the natural so as to defy details. One cause of this is the evident effect of leather work. The coloured leather funereal tent of Isiemkheb, found at Deir el Bahri, opens our eyes to a great deal. We there see an elaborate design, descending to long inscriptions of small hieroglyphs, all worked by cutting and stitching of leather. After this we can see in many of the Egyptian designs the influence of leather work; and nowhere is this plainer than in the rosettes. The earliest rosettes we know, those on the head-band of Nefert, at the very beginning of monumental history, are plain discs of colour divided into segments by white lines across them. These are discs of leather secured by radiating threads; and the same are seen in the XVIIIth dynasty, more varied by concentric circles of colours, probably successive superposed discs stitched down one over the other.
101.—P. [81].
102.—P. [116].