After death, at least from the Eighteenth Dynasty, divine honors were frequently paid to the queen, and especially was this the case of Queens Aah-hotep and Nefertari, the ancestresses of the race of kings who drove out and succeeded the Hyksos, the usurping rulers, and restored Egypt to its native sovereigns.
The palaces were usually of brick, as the temples were of stone adorned with gorgeously painted walls and furnished with carpets, rugs of skin and ebony and ivory chairs and couches. The queen was attended by slaves, and some favored maid or official bore beside her a fan of ostrich plumes. She wore in later periods the double crown of Egypt and presided beside the king at feasts, where men and women, with unveiled faces (veiling being an introduction of the Persians), enjoyed themselves together. They decorated each other with flowers, which already in profusion adorned the drinking vessels, listened to music and watched the dancing of female slaves, the feats of jugglers, etc. Monkeys were sometimes trained to act as torchbearers, and we can imagine the confusion occasionally engendered when one or another of them, bursting, so to speak, the bands of conventionality, reverted to his naturally mischievous impulses and cast his flaming torch into the midst of the festivities. Lions, leopards, dogs, and the specially sacred cats were all numbered among the pets.
The cat, it is said, was created in the ark, hence the Garden of Eden, “where the comforts of home were incompletely organized,” lacked that ornament of the domestic hearth. But by the Egyptians she was, above all, valued and adored. They mourned for her as for a dear and familiar friend, and woe to the man who, even by accident, compassed her destruction. She is most pleasingly set forth by one who evidently admired and appreciated her:
“A little lion, small and dainty sweet
(For such there be),
With sea-grey eyes and softly stepping feet,
She prayed of me.
For this, through lands Egyptian far away,
She bade me pass;
But in an evil hour I said her nay;