La Flore pharaonique_ (2nd ed., Paris, 1892), and the
authorities there cited.

_Domestic Animals and Birds._--The farmer kept up a large stock of
animals: in the houses there were pets and in the temples sacred
creatures of many kinds. Goats browsed on the trees and herbage at the
edge of the desert. Sheep of a peculiar breed with horizontal twisted
horns and hairy coat are figured on the earliest monuments: a more
valuable variety, woolly with curved horns, made its appearance in the
Middle Kingdom and pushed out the older form: sheep were driven into the
ploughed fields to break the clods and trample in the seed. The oxen
were long-horned, short-horned and polled. They drew the plough,
trampled the corn sheaves round the circular threshing floor, and were
sometimes employed to drag heavy weights. The pig is rarely figured and
was less and less tolerated as the Egyptians grew in ceremonial purity.
A variety of wild animals caught in the chase were kept alive and fed
for slaughter. Geese and ducks of different sorts were bred in countless
numbers by the farmers, also pigeons and quails, and in the early ages
cranes. The domestic fowl was unknown in Egypt before the Deltaic
dynasties, but Diodorus in the first century B.C. describes how its eggs
were hatched artificially, as they are at the present day. Bee-keeping,
too, must have been a considerable industry, though dates furnished a
supply of sweetening material.

The farm lands were generally held at a rent from an overlord, who might
according to times and circumstances be the king, a feudal prince, or a
temple-corporation. The stock also might be similarly held, or might
belong to the farmers. The ordinary beast of burden, even in the desert,
was the ass. The horse seems to have been introduced with the chariot
during the Hyksos period. It is thought that the camel is shown in rude
figures of the earliest age, but it is scarcely traceable again before
the XXVIth Dynasty. In the Ptolemaic period it was used for desert
transport and gradually became common. Strange to say, it is only very
rarely that men are depicted riding on animals, and never before the New
Kingdom.

The dog was of many varieties as early as the XIIth Dynasty, when the
greyhound and turnspit and other well-marked forms are seen. The cat was
sometimes trained by the sportsman to catch birds. Monkeys were commonly
kept as pets. The sacred beasts in the various temples, tame as far as
possible,