Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/831

Rh abaikour, by which the hunting-dog is designated in many of the Berber dialects. A servant is holding them behind the king, who is looking at them, and prevents their disturbing the sacrificial ceremony at which they are present.

The shepherds had dogs of medium size with pointed ears, like those which still guard the flocks of Upper Egypt. Hunters sought out two or three kinds of hounds (Fig. 3), some having straight ears and short tails, and some drooping ears and a long tail, like the slouguis of the modern Berbers. They are to be seen in many of the tombs, springing in pursuit of gazelles and antelopes, or running down the hare and the ostrich. A few pugs, heavy and grotesque like ours (Fig. 2), are represented occasionally, rather as house-dogs than as hunters. These animals were in considerable number, and made the ancient Egyptian villages as dangerous at night as modern villages are. An officer relegated to one of the Delta burgs a few years after the death of Rameses II complained bitterly of their boldness in a letter addressed to one of his chiefs: "When, sometimes," he says, "the people of the country meet to drink Cilician beer and go out to open the bottles—there are two hundred large mastiffs and three hundred wolf-dogs waiting all day at the door of my house—every time I go out at nightfall to take part in the feast, I am kept out if I have not with me the little wolf-dog of Nahihou, the royal scribe, who lodges with me. He saves me from the other dogs. At whatever time I go, he goes with me on the street; and when he barks I run, swinging my club and whips. It is, in fact, only a pack of the mangy, high-tailed wolf-dogs prowling around the cattle pens. When they have made their round, the largest ones in front, in a compact mass, as if in a bunch, one would say that it was the enchantment of some god, a flame which had fixed itself and would not let go." Roving dogs are less numerous and less ferocious now, but they become at times terrible to strangers. It has oftened happened to me, when casually passing through a village of Upper Egypt about midnight, to be reminded when I met them of the bull-dog in one of Dickens's novels, "a biter of man and killer of children for sport, which usually lived on the right side of the street, but also hid itself on the left side, so as to be ready to jump upon the first passer-by." As it is under Tewfik Pasha, so it was in the time of Rameses II, and the experience of the present day enables us to understand exactly what our scribe meant in the passage I have just quoted.

The dog was a god; he was at the same time several gods, of which the best known, the barking Anubis of the Latin poets, was also a jackal. As there were cemeteries for cats, there were also for dogs, where their mummies are to be found by the thousand. I am cognizant of them at Siout, Sheik Fadl, Feshn, Sakkarah,