CROCODILUS NILOTICUS. 15 
pastimes. In the same tomb another scene depicts a combat between the two animals, 
in which the hippopotamus is victorious. The prevalence of these animals throughout 
Egypt in early times is moreover attested by the monuments of Beni Hassan and 
Thebes. 
It, however, ranged further north than Gizeh, and with the hippopotamus was 
distributed over the streams of the delta and probably extended to lake El Timsah * ; 
and it is recorded 2 that, in the time of Alexander the Great, several soldiers were 
devoured by crocodiles in the delta, where its existence in the beginning of the 
Christian era is established by the account Seneca s has given of a battle between 
crocodiles and dolphins of the sea, at the mouth of the Heracleotic branch of the 
Nile, about 22 Roman miles west of Pelusium, a tale which Pliny has reproduced, 
possibly on the strength of Seneca's statement. 
Macoudi 4 , who was in Egypt about 950 A.D., relates that Hutmen, Governor of 
Egypt under the Caliphs of Babylon, about 875, had discovered at Crocodilopolis the 
leaden figure of a crocodile the size of life and bearing an Egyptian inscription. The 
Governor ordered it to be broken up, and from the day that this happened the 
crocodiles began to do a great deal of harm ; and Macoudi remarks that the strange 
thing was that the crocodiles that went down to the sea harmed no one, but that on 
returning they killed and ate all that they could catch, and he adds, as a possible 
explanation, that the crocodiles in descending towards the sea found abundance of fish, 
but little in returning. The descent of these crocodiles doubtless was coincident with 
the rise of the Nile. 
Maillet 5 , who was Consul for France in Egypt, in 1692, states that the crocodile was 
rarely seen in the delta in his day, but its presence there up to nearly the middle of 
last century is recorded by E. Brown 6 . Shaw 7 , who wrote in 1738, said that so 
rarely did the crocodile appear below the cataracts that the sight of one was as great 
1 Crocodile Lake, or Timsah, once a reedy pond o£ brackish water. ' Egypt,' S. Lane-Poole, 1881, p. 116. 
2 Ampere, Rev. des deux Mondes, ser. v., xix. 1844-5, p. 222. 
3 Seneca, Quaest. Nat. lib. iv. cap. 2. The following is Seneca's account : — " Balbillus, a scholar, prefect 
of Egypt, and a reliable man, tells of a fight he saw at the Heracleotic mouth of the Kile — the largest of 
the seven — between a school of dolphins from the sea and a herd of crocodiles who advanced to meet them. 
The crocodiles were beaten, though their adversaries are peaceable by nature and their bite is not dangerous. 
This was because the belly of the crocodile is soft and unprotected by scales, and the dolphins wounded 
them from beneath by means of the spines on their backs." The bite of a dolphin not being dangerous, 
according to Balbillus, and he not knowing the soft nature of the dorsal fin of a cetacean, erroneously 
concluded that the fin had wounded the crocodile in the most vulnerable part. But by dolphins he may not 
have meant cetaceans, but some large species of fish with a big dorsal spine. All that the passage establishes 
is the presence of the crocodile in the locality in question. 
4 Macoudi, quoted by Marmol, i. (French ed., 1667) pp. 61-62. 
5 Descr. de l'%ypte, 1735, p. 32*. 
Travels, ii. 1753, p. 154. 
' Travels in Barbary and Levant, 1738, p. 427. 
