TAA i.3.23.8

                                         (VII)

the King; the dadoes are enhanced by an arrangement
of engraved shallow panels (see fig …); while a rectangular

ornament travels round and frames the doors.

          The joinery of these shrines shows much skill, and an
intimate knowledge of construction as well as of the structure

and nature of woods.

          Cedar wood seems to have been employed throughout

for the planks and boards; while harder and tougher woods,

like oak and Christ’s thorn wood, were used for the 

cross-tongues that strengthened the joints and held together

the various members and sections. In fact, throughout these

four shrines there is a system of utilizing the different 

structural properties of woods, for certain purposes, which con-

forms with the most modern rules in the art of joinery. 

          The more or less standard sizes of the timber employed, 

suggests that the ancient Egyptian joiner, very much

like the joiner of our day, had prepared balks, planks,

deals, batterns, and strips, from which he shaped his

work. In point of fact, so much were the methods 

employed by those ancients the same as those of the

joiners’ art of today, to describe them one has but to

quote from the latest article upon modern joinery, published

in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (XIV^th Ed., Vol. XIII, pp. 120cf.).