Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/830

810 benches of the guests; as in Greece and Rome, he was there to dispose of the bones, the fragments of meat, and the pieces of bread that were thrown down, and in a general way to keep the dining-room clean. These were certainly not very refined fashions, and if our house-dogs had to satisfy themselves in this way they would be likely to die of hunger. The ancients did not feel the delicate tastes and disgusts in such matters that we experience; their life presented excessive refinements and rude features of which we have no idea side by side. The house-dog in Egypt was a domestic, working at his trade, only his trade was one of those in which we have ceased to employ him; it may not have been a great thing that he has lost, but it is in the kitchen or his kennel that he finishes up his master's dessert.

The house-dog was shaved, combed, and washed; he was sometimes tinted with henna as if he were a woman; he wore fine collars on his neck, furnished sometimes with an earthenware clasp in the shape of a bell or a flower. Children played with him, became attached to him, and the hero of one story to whom his fates had predicted at his birth that he would die of the bite of a dog, willingly confronted the threatened danger rather than be separated from the dog which he had raised. He, of course, had a name, to which he answered: Si-togai, the son of the bat; Akeni, the ferreter; Khaoabsou, the lamp or star; Soubou, the



 Fig. 1, one of the favorite dogs of King Antef, from his funereal stele. Fig. 2, bitch depicted in a Theban tomb of the twentieth dynasty. Fig. 3, hound from the tomb of Anna at Thebes (eighteenth dynasty ), from a drawing by M. Boussac.

strong; and Nahsi, the black. He is seen with kings as well as with common persons. Rameses II, during the earlier years of his reign, was always escorted by a female dog which was called Anaïtiennaktou, or brave as the goddess Anaïtis. A petty king of the eleventh dynasty, about 3,300, had five dogs which he loved so much that he carved their names and engraved their portraits on his tomb They were, indeed, blooded animals whose names revealed their foreign origin. The finest one of them (Fig. 1) was called Abaikarou, a faithful transcription of the word