594 The Dog Book 



dog was the prevailing one in Assyria, according to sculptures and tablets 

 which have been discovered there. A large number of the Egyptian hunt- 

 ing dogs were also drop-eared and any priority which may be claimed as 

 between the greyhound or tracking hound will have to be based upon some 

 other ground than description of ears. 



In old Egyptian and Assyrian representations of dogs we have to take 

 into consideration the conventional type, which differed very much. All 

 Assyrian dogs are stout, strong, muscular dogs of what we should call mastiff 

 type. The Egyptian artists, on the other hand depicted their dogs as leggy, 

 light of build and running more to the greyhound type, "weeds" we would 

 be likely to call them. We know that Assyrian dogs were taken to Egypt 

 as gifts and also as tribute, yet these tribute dogs are painted on Egyptian 

 conventional lines, while the same type of dogs by an Assyrian sculptor are 

 made altogether different. We must therefore discard all of them as truly 

 representative, except where we come across radical differences between 

 Egyptian dogs or between dogs of Assyria. 



It was Colonel Hamilton Smith's opinion that, although Greek and 

 Roman authors gave tribal names to some sixteen or seventeen hunting dogs 

 there were but two distinct races: one of greyhounds and one of dogs that 

 hunted by scent. One of these tribal names was the Elymaean, which 

 name was claimed by some to have come down through many generations 

 in one form or another till it became the limer,the bloodhound led in leash 

 or Ham to track the quarry to its lair or harbour. There seems also to have 

 been a dog of greyhound type that had a similar name, but with an added 

 "m,'* its mission being to race at the game and pin it by the nose, whereas 

 the bloodhound was not used further than to locate the game and was never 

 off the lead. In the Assyrian sculptures we find hunting dogs on the lead 

 and they are also represented in a similar manner in Egyptian paintings, 

 both erect- and drop-eared, or, as we would characterise them, greyhounds 

 and scenting hounds. There is nothing in which custom is more of an 

 heirloom than in sporting practice and the leading of the greyhounds in slips, 

 taking the brace of setters on lead, or coupling the hounds, might possibly 

 have had its origin a long way farther back than the Assyrian dog on the 

 leash which Layard considered was one of the oldest tablets he had found 

 at Nineveh. It is only about two hundred years since foxhounds were 

 hunted in couples, and all through the old prints and illustrations hounds 

 are shown in couples when led afield, one man taking each couple. 



