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Some ideas in the plan of these structures, and indeed in some of the Indian temples, appear to correspond with those of the Egyptian monuments of the same class, particularly in the vast propylon, or entrance-block, and the great internal hall with smaller chambers. At the same time there is not the slightest coincidence in decorative detail or any architectural feature. The hieroglyphics, which throughout Egyptian monuments constitute the dominant enrichment, find no corresponding features in Indian art, where all the ornament consists of rudely conventional foliage and symbols and representations of innumerable deities.

Returning briefly to Egypt, we have to notice the enormous scale upon which their great national monuments were cast. The avenues of sphinxes, the enormous temples, the endless groves of columns, and the profusion with which their sculpture was combined with their structures, exhibit to us an enormous population labouring to carry out the behests of a despotic sovereign, and a yet more despotic priesthood.

Unlike the course of progress is almost all other styles, in the Egyptian the tendency, as time rolls on, is to degenerate rather than to improve. The earliest structures in Egypt are the simplest in their architectural forms, and at the same time the most beautiful. The bell-shaped capitals of the highest pillars of the enormous temple of Karnac are some of the most elegant which have ever been designed. The great colossi which constitute the façade of the temple of Abou Simbel, in Nubia, in their dignified repose are amongst the most majestic applications of colossal sculpture to structure which have ever been executed.

In the later periods of Egyptian architecture the temples at Denderah even increase in definition and elaboration, but, as they spread in plan, they become complicated and lose those features of simple and grave beauty which characterize the monuments of the age of Rameses.