438 ANNUAL. REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1924 



and ostrich. As several of these animals are not now known in 

 Egypt it has been argued that the scenes do not faithfully represent 

 the ancient fauna of the countr3\ But I can see no reason to doubt 

 that the scenes depict actual hunts that took place in the Arabian 

 and Libjan Deserts not far from the localities in which the tombs 

 figuring them are found. There is some corroborative evidence in 

 the references in the ancient literature to the hunting of the wild 

 animals that frequented Egypt. Thutmose IV., for example, hunted 

 the lion and ibex in the desert plateau near Memphis : ^ Amenhotep 

 III. killed 102 fierce lions during the first ten years of his reign,*' 

 and in his second regnal year he hunted wild cattle in the desert near 

 Keneh ; ^ he saAv there a herd of 170, and of these he and his hunts- 

 men captured 96. The desert to the east of Kiift was a famous 

 hunting-ground at the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty. At the 

 present day all but one of the animals represented in these ancient 

 hunting scenes are found in the Nubian Deserts to the south of 

 Egypt. The exception is important; it is the fallow deer which be- 

 longs to the Holarctic, not to the Ethiopian, zoological zone. Al- 

 though most of the animals that were hunted by the dynastic Egyp- 

 tians have now disappeared from their northern home, many have 

 been recorded in recent years as occurring in the Arabian and Libyan 

 Deserts. We can, in fact, follow them gradually receding south- 

 wards. The dorcas gazelle is still common in both deserts, and the 

 addax sometimes occurs in the region of the Wadi Natrun. The 

 ibex is occasionally seen on the mountains northeast of Keneh. The 

 Barbary sheep {Avimotragus tragelaphus) was observed by Dr. 

 Schweinfurth in 1878 in the Wadi Shietun which opens on the Nile 

 below Ekhmim.^ The wild ass was recorded by James Burton in 

 1823 in the desert northeast of Keneh; he remarks that then the 

 Arabs of this part of the desert let their female donkeys loose to be 

 served by the wild males.^ Later, in 1828, Linant de Bellefonds saw 

 many wild asses in the region between Darawi and Berber; they 

 were, he says, often trapped by the Bisharin, who used the flesh as 

 food. During the first half of the eighteenth century the ostrich 

 frequented the desert near Suez.® A hundred years later it was re- 

 ported to be numerous in the Arabian Desert opposite Esneh, and 

 there is a wadi, some distance southeast of Aswan, that is called by 

 the Arabs Wadi Naam, "the Wadi of Ostriches." In the Libyan 

 Desert the bird was fairly common in the eighteenth century. W. G. 

 Browne, who traveled along the coast west of Alexandria in 1792, 



6 The Sphinx Stela, 1, 5. 



■ Newberry Scarabs, Plates XXXIII-IV. 



''Gironale I'Esploratore, anno II, fasc. 4. 



8 Brit Mus., Add. MS., 25666. 



» Burckhardt, Travels In Syria, 1822, p. 461. 



