8 
THE MAMMALS OF EGYPT. 
Alpini, but his descriptions are so vague, and his illustrations so crude, that the results 
are of no scientific interest. There is only one exception to this, viz. his unmistakable 
account of a red, long-tailed monkey, kept alive in his house in Cairo for two years, 
which there can be little, if any, hesitation in identifying with the Cercopithecus 
pijrrhomtus. Hemp. & Ehr. The only one of his figures which is recognizable is 
that of the Barbary ape. The animals represented in his three plates (17 to 19) have 
been identified as Papio hamadryas, and, indeed, have served as the types of Simia 
hamadryas in Linneeus’s 10th edition of the ‘ Systema Naturae,’ but even that author 
comments on the vagueness of the representations. 
Hasselquist^ mentions only two species of monkeys observed by him in Egypt: one, 
which he designates Simia cegyptiaca^ the dog-head monkey, about the size of a young 
bear, which w^as brought to Egypt by vagrants and exhibited to the people at the time 
of the inundation of the Nile; and another, Simia cethiops, which the negroes carried to 
l>ower Egypt in great numbers. Both of these species, he says, were from Ethiopia. 
The first was Papio hamadryas, which to the present day is exhibited in the towns and 
villages, while the second was Cercopithecus cethiops of this work. 
ForskaP, in his enumeration of Egyptian mammals observed by himself, mentions 
under Simia caudata —‘ Bobah,’ with naked buttocks; and ‘ Nisnas,’ said to come 
from Nubia. The native name applied to the first species proves it to be the 
Hamadryas baboon; as the term Nisnas, however, appears to have been applied in 
Lower Egypt to more than one species of monkey, the speculation that C. pyrrhonotus 
only was referred to by that name may or may not be correct. 
E. Geofiroy St.-Hilaire’s and Audouin’s account of the mammals of Egypt ^ dealt 
exclusively with the Nile Valley from the sea to Assuan; there is consequently no 
reference to monkeys. 
Cailliaud ^ clearly indicated the existence of Cercopithecus cethiops in the Nile Valley, 
and established the occurrence in Sennaar of a red species of the same genus, which he 
regarded as C. patas. He also recorded the presence in the “ He de Meroe ” (between 
the Atbara and the Blue Nile), and at Sennaar, of a baboon which he designated 
Simia sphinx, but of which he gave no description. 
Ehrenberg, who w’as with Hemprich in New Hongola in 1822, while Cailliaud was 
at Sennaar, states in his chapter on Papio hamadryas in the ‘Symbolse Physicse’— 
a work to w'hich I am much indebted for the references to and quotations from the old 
authors in this present article—that the only monkeys seen by him and Hemprich in 
Hongola were Cercopithecus salceus, Linn. ( = C. cethiops), ecudiC.pyrrhonotus, & 
Ehr., and these were in confinement; the former in the quarters of the Turkish soldiery, 
and the latter in the possession of some merchants returning from Kordofan and 
1 Iter Palffist. 1757. ^ Descr. Aniin. 1775, p. iii. 
3 Descr. de I'Egypte, Hist. Nat. ii. 1818. Voy. a Meroe, &c. 1819-22, vol. iv. p. 268. 
