Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

The unclean animal often divides with the dogs the scavengering of the towns. The part assigned him is the part the dogs’ stomachs will not allow them to undertake. Outside the city a herd of swine is generally to be seen on the filth-heap. It was there I saw them, at Alexandria, Jerusalem, and elsewhere. A few solitary stragglers only are met with in the streets. Of all that is hideous-looking, and hideously filthy, I never beheld anything worse than these eastern town pigs: long-snouted, long-legged, long-haired, ridge-backed, mangy, bespattered with grime. I could hardly have supposed that there had been in the nature of things such disgusting organisms. A sense of loathing sickens you as you see them. But we must not be hard on the helpless brute: is it not more shocking that man, endowed with large discourse of reason, with sovereign power to distinguish wrong from right, the lord, the soul, the very blossom of this visible world, bid to look with the inward eye, as he has been enabled to do with the bodily eye, onwards and upwards, should, notwithstanding, still make himself a hog, morally a scavenger? And this position has been forced by necessity on the swine of the East—they did not turn to it from choice.

Christian travellers in the East, who will eat swine’s flesh, buy it from the Greeks. That it was sold by a Greek is no guarantee that it is food for a dog. Day after day I saw at Jerusalem a Greek boy tending a herd of swine on the filth-heap outside the Jaffa gate. Hard by, against the wall, were sitting a row of noseless, toothless, handless, footless lepers. It was a sight, this combination of animal and human debasement, to make one shudder. But as to those ordure and garbage consuming organisms on the filth-heap: the chemistry of nature can work wonders, but those wonders have a limit. It cannot transmute that filth into human food. As well might you dine on a rat taken from a sewer, or a vulture caught in the ribbed cavity of a camel it was busy in eviscerating. It were all one to sup with the ghouls.

In this matter it is entirely, from first to last, a question of climate, and, through climate, of vegetation. In this part of the world we have a moist climate, and, as a consequence, we have woods, supplying acorns, beech-mast, and other sylvan fruits; and the same cause gives us grassy meadows, and clover-fields, where pigs can graze. And we have abundance of roots and corn, and much refuse garden-stuff; which all comes to this, that in these latitudes nature and man supply the pig, all the year round, with abundance of clean and wholesome food. In the East nature has withheld every one of these gifts. There are no woods, no meadows; and for him no roots, no fruits. Throughout Egypt, with the small exception of some uncultivated marshes in the Delta and Faioum, there is not a mouthful of food for pigs. They must, therefore, become scavengers of towns, or make their exit altogether from the scene. People are very poor in these parts; and those among the Greeks whose poverty suggests to them the idea of making a few piastres by keeping pigs cannot, of course, be well off. The supposition, then, that such people will always buy corn, costly to them, and of which they are in need themselves, for pigs that other people are to eat, is Utopian.

America could not have been settled without the pig; but then the pig has in America a perennial feast of good things. It is the pig’s paradise. The country is under forest. Wood-nuts, and wild fruit of several sorts, are everywhere. Peaches, and maize, and many other things good enough for his betters, are in inexhaustible abundance. Here in England it is one of the luxuries of having a little bit of land, that you never need be without pig, in one form or another, in the house. Besides it is the only animal a cottager can keep. Nothing else is within his reach. Liebig tells us, too, that for those who are exposed to the cold and damp climate of this part of the world, no food is so suited as bacon; and the more oleaginous the better.

In the East the law-givers were right who made religion ban piggy. They could not reason with the multitude on a point of this kind. They could not make distinctions and exceptions. When you have to do with a hungry stomach reason does not go for much. Of course they did not take into consideration the opposite circumstances of other parts of the world. What would be good for us here was no concern of theirs.

The Buffalo.

The buffalo, if it were only for his uncouthness, ought not to be unnoticed here. He has, however, another claim to a place in our picture, from his so frequently coming into view. He is hardier, and heavier, than the ox, and has, therefore, to a great extent, taken its place both at the plough, and at the water-wheel. The Egyptian buffalo has no resemblance to the brawny-shouldered, shaggy-maned, clean-legged, American prairie bison, injuriously miscalled a buffalo. What our Egyptian’s hairless, slate-coloured carcass is most like is that of some ill-shaped primæval pachyderm. You would hardly take him for a congener of the ox, even after you had noticed his horns; such horns as they are, for they are so reflexed, and twisted, as to give you the idea that something must have gone wrong with them, till you find that they are alike in all. The little buffalo calf, by the side of its ugly, dull, soulless dam, seems a far more creditable piece of nature’s handicraft. You can hardly believe that a few months will metamorphose it into such ugliness.

The Ox.

Of the existing ox so little is seen that nothing need be said here, except that it is a diminutive specimen of its kind; and that it gives dry, stringy beef. It was different in the time of the old Egyptians. They had (what had they not?) a polled breed as well as long-horns, and also some breeds that were curiously-marked. But both bull and cow were then divine. The latter was sacred to Athyr, the Venus of Egypt. The former was worshipped as the symbol of strength, and of the generative powers of nature; and, besides, his quiet rumination suggested the idea of the sufficiency, and wisdom, of reflective meditation. Since they ceased to be divine the couple have much degenerated.