The Gizeh Museum formerly contained three hippopotamuses of this shade, discovered in the tomb of an Entef[62] at Drah Abu'l Neggeh[63] One was lying down, the two others were standing in the marshes, their bodies being covered by the potter with pen-and-ink sketches of reeds and lotus plants, amid which hover birds and butterflies (fig.

229).

This was his naive way of depicting the animal amid his natural surroundings.

The blue is splendid, and we must overleap twenty centuries before we again find so pure a colour among the funerary statuettes of Deir el Bahari.

Green reappears under the Saite dynasties, but paler than that of more ancient times, and it prevailed in the north of Egypt, at Memphis, Bubastis, and Sais, without entirely banishing the blue.