FANCY PIGEONS, 



Chapter I. 



o< HISTORICAL. 

 Egyptian Records. 



IGEONS must have been domesticated at a 

 very early period. They figure on Egyptian 

 monuments forty-six centuries old. Mr. H. 

 Villiers Stuart, M.P., informs me he has seen 

 pigeons represented on Egyptian bas-reliefs 

 of the Fourth Dynasty, at least 2700 B.C., though some 

 Egyptologists put it further back. He says they occur 

 frequently in tombs of that and the following dynasties, 

 being represented as borne in cages on the heads of slaves, 

 or carried in their hands by the wings. He has also seen, 

 on bas-reliefs of the Nineteenth Dynasty (about 1350 B.C.), 

 pigeons being liberated in triumphal processions and flying 

 away, possibly to convey intelligence of the event to the 

 limits of the empire. 



I find, in "Records of the Past" (1873), in the Annals of 

 Thothmes III., of the Eighteenth Dynasty (about 1500 B.C.), 



