based on horizontal lines; this became 20 during the New Kingdom Amarna period, 24 during Kushite rule, and, ultimately, 21 in the first century BCE, as Diodorus testified. Referring to the grid system during the Amarna period, Robins says, 'there are 20 squares instead of the traditional 18 squares [...] The height of 20 squares is confirmed by measurements on the figure in the tomb of Mahu that preserves some grid traces' (Robins, 1994, p. 123). Elsewhere, she states that the artists' primary concern was to use 'established conventions to encode the information about the world that they wished to convey'(1994, p.3).  
Although there is no doubt as to the status of Telecles and Theodoros as great Greek artists, the Roman Pliny stated that the Athenian Apollodorus 'was the first to give his figures the appearance of reality' (Davis, 1979, p. 125), drawing from the same Egyptian source. Verification of the reputed knowledge of the Kemites is supplied by Plato (1977, p. 132): ancient Greeks were an 'unlettered mountain race' (i.e., they had no writing); Solon, one of the great Greek sages (seventh and sixth centuries BCE), who were defined as men of politics and not of wisdom, went to Kemet to learn about ancient Greek history from the Kemite priests. In a manuscript Plato inherited from his own father, he equates the attempt at the reformation of the Greek State with the 'infliction of exile and death' (1973, p. 122). To these nascent Greek philosophers, Kemet thus appeared a miraculous State.