The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-06-16
OLD WOOD CARVINGS.
ENGLAND'S OF THE THIRTEENTIT
 CENTURY
Are Modern Compared With Egypt,s
 Of 5000 B. c.

| Although in the priory at Christ
 church, Hants, at Westminster Abbey,
 Salisbury cathedral and in a few other
 of our ancient ministers, there may be seen to-day miserere seats and Gas at
 Salisbury other small portions of stalla dating from the middle of the thir- | teenth century, the oak in each of | which is as sound now as it was in the
 days when the respective monarchs of the forest bowed their sturdy heads to the Woodmans aX, the palm, as regards seniority, is claimed and justly so, by 1 Exeter cathedral. Therein, in the | choir, may be seen fifty miserere seats, l every one different, cleverly carved and | enriched by figure and by foliage, the oak in each and every one of them per- l fectly hard and solid, and although in- | nocent from the least indication of rot | or decay, carved under the direction of
 Bishop Bruere (tenth bishop of Exeter), who ruled over this diocese from the | year 1224 to that of 1244. Taken as d whole, they are not only the most per | feet examples of early thirteenth cen-
 tury work in this country, but also in any cathedral or church in the Wodld. Bruere Cor William Briwere as he is | sometimes called in ancient manu- scripts) was for nearly five years away in the Holy Land. This accounts no doubt, for the altogether eastern char acter of some of the figure carvings upon these superb misereres. One of them represents an elephant, and is of exceptional interest, in that it is the
 ali fr,&s 0f hot
 quadruped in existence in England.
 It is curious, too, in that its carver
 apparently never having seen such an
 animal, has represented it with the
 hind legs of 6 dog, although, as we all
 know now, an elephants hind legs pos
 sess hooks precisely the same as are
 the foreones, and hence its ability to
 kneel down like Christian. But, af
 ter all, we are but new people; and
 what with us appears to be ancient his-
 tory is very modern indeed, when we
 come to compare ourselves with some
 other countries-Egypt, for instance.
 The most ancient carved wood figure
 it is of sycamore--known to exist may
 be seen in the museum of Gizeh, at Cai- TO. It dates from B. c. 1900, so is very nearly six thousand years old, and still the wood is sound and good. This pre- cious old statuette was found at Sakka- rah, and is supposed to represent one of the overseers of the workmen en- gagged in building the pyramids which abound in that immediate neighbor- hood and, by comparatively recent dis coveries, have been proved to be the oldest of all the pyramids of Egypt. | The statue is known as the "Sheikh-el Peled," or "Sheikh of the Village a name given it by the Arabs who found ! it, because it's features represented very | closely those of the man who was then | their own sheikh. In this we get a wonderful instance of how human na- l ture, through the roll of thousands of | years keeps on repeating itself. The | statue is distinctly portrait, showing | a jolly, well-fed, closely shaven man of | fifty summers or thereabout altogether | nude, save for cloth bound by a leather girdle about his lustry Joins, and reaching down to his knees. He stands erect and in the right hand grasps a staff, but I do not think the lotter is part of the original The exact height of the statuette is three feet eight and one-half inches. A careful cast in plaster of paris of this wonder full old carving was made early in 1894, and may now be seen in one of the Egyptian galleries of the British muso- im. This, then, is the oldest known ex- sting example of the wood- carver's craft-London Woodworker.