The three following heads are copied from Mr. Perring’s very interesting memoir.
No. 1, the portrait of a king whose name is read _Skai_ by Champollion, copied from his tomb in the western valley near Thebes. The bold, heavy features, and harsh expression are very remarkable, and Mr. Perring observes that this personage is represented of a much lighter red than is usual with the Egyptians.
No. 2. Head of another king of this exotic dynasty, with long sharp features, whose name reads _Atenre-Backhan_ on the monuments, copied from a stone in the second propylon of Karnak.
No. 3. Another effigy of the same king, from the grottoes of El Tell, of which Mr. Perring remarks, that having been copied in haste it is somewhat in caricature.
El Tell, or Tel-el-Amarna, appears to have been the stronghold of these “foreign marauders,” respecting whom Mr. Gliddon, after suggesting the probability that the sovereigns may have been of Arabian origin, inquires—“whether the present inhabitants, whose village occupies the once warlike camp or city of _Atenre_, have in their views and in their physical conformation, some vestiges of that early tribe of heterodox conquerors? And may not then the cause of the almost instinctive terror with which the natives of other parts of Egypt regard this vicinity, proceed from vague traditions of ancient predatory habits,—some fitful legend that has outlived thirty-five centuries?”[91]
There are many effigies of the same general character of the age of the fourth Rameses. One of them, a captive, is figured in the margin. Wilkinson reads their name Tochari on the monuments; Rosellini translates it Fekkaro. To my view they have the lined and hardy features of the Celts or Gauls, of whom, however, we have little knowledge at that remote date, (B.C. 1400,) although even then they occupied a large part of southern Europe. They perhaps rather pertain to the Phenician branch of the Caucasian race.
There are other paintings, especially some at Abousimbel of the age of Rameses III., which correspond in every particular with the Scythian physiognomy as recorded in history;[92] and the name of _Scheto_, by which they are designated on the monuments, confirms the suggestion of the hieroglyphists that they represent a Scythian or Scytho-Bactrian people.[93]