Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/384

 :52 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. founds itself upon reality while turning it into ridicule by the accentuation of its most laughable features. But the drawings in this manuscript are inspired by the same ideas and the same intellectual bent as our modern caricatures. They respond to the universal taste of mankind for the mental relaxation afforded by parody, for the relief from the serious business of life which is to be found in comedy and burlesque. Ancient Egypt was a merry country. Its inhabitants were as pleased as children over the simplest and most homely jokes ; jests, fantastic tales, and fables in which animals acted like men and women, were as popular with them as with their successors in civilisation. Their comic artists were especially fond of treating scenes of this last description, and their works often remind us of those produced in much later times for the illustration of /llsop or La Fontaine. 7 rA' ■' '^mm^'^ Fig. 27S.— Battle of the Cats and Rats. From rrisse. Prisse reproduces the most interesting part of the Turin papyrus, and we have copied a fragment of his plate (Fig. 278). " In the first group, four animals — an ass, a lion, a crocodile, and a monkey— make up a quartette, playing on such musical instru- ments as were then in fashion. Next comes an ass dressed, armed, and sceptred like a Pharaoh ; with a majestic swagger he receives the offerings brought to him by a cat of high degree, to whom a bull is proud to act as conductor. At the side a uni- corn seems to threaten a kneeling cat with its harp The scenes drawn below, and on a smaller scale, are no more coherent than these. In the first place we see a Hock of geese in open rebellion against its conductors — three cats, one of whom has fallen under the blows of the angry birds. Next we come to a