A Condemned Soul, Egyptian Caricature.
This picture, which is of such antiquity that it was an object of curiosity to the Romans and the Greeks, is part of the decoration of a king's tomb. In the original, Osiris, the august judge of departed spirits, is represented on his throne, near the stern of the boat, waving away the Soul, which he has just weighed in his unerring scales and found wanting; while close to the shore a man hews away the ground, to intimate that all communication is cut off between the lost spirit and the abode of the blessed. The animals that execute the stern decree are the dog-headed monkeys, sacred in the mythology of Egypt.
Egyptian Servants conveying Home their Masters from a Carouse.
That the ancient Egyptians were a jovial people who sat long at the wine, we might infer from the caricatures which have been discovered in Egypt, if we did not know it from other sources of information. Representations have been found of every part of the process of wine-making, from the planting of the vineyard to the storing-away of the wine-jars. In the valuable works of Sir Gardner Wilkinson[2] many of these curious pictures are given: the vineyard and its trellis-work; men frightening away the birds with slings; a vineyard with a water-tank for irrigation; the grape harvest; baskets full of grapes covered with leaves; kids browsing upon the vines; trained monkeys gathering grapes; the wine-press in operation; men pressing grapes by the natural process of treading; pouring the wine into jars; and rows of jars put away for future use. The same laborious author favors us with ancient Egyptian caricatures which serve to show that wine was a creature as capable of abuse thirty centuries ago as it is now.
Pictures of similar character are not unfrequent upon the ancient frescoes, and many of them are far more extravagant than this, exhibiting men dancing wildly, standing upon their heads, and riotously fighting. From Sir Gardner Wilkinson's disclosures we may reasonably infer that the arts of debauchery have received little addition during the last three thousand years. Even the seductive cocktail is not modern. The ancient Egyptians imbibed stimulants to excite an appetite for wine, and munched the biting cabbage-leaf for the same purpose. Beer in several varieties was known to them also; veritable beer, made of barley and a bitter herb; beer so excellent that the dainty Greek travelers commended it as a drink only inferior to wine. Even the Egyptian ladies did not always resist the temptation of so many modes of intoxication. Nor did they escape the caricaturist's pencil.
Too Late with the Basin.