[Egypt.]—­The mutilated statistical tablet of Karnak (Trans.  R. Soc.  Lit., 1847, p. 369, and 1863, p. 65) refers to an armed invasion of Armenia by Thothmes III., and the payment of a large tribute of antelopes and birds.  When Ptolemy Philadelphus feted the Alexandrians (Athenoeus, v.), the Ethiopians brought dogs, buffaloes, bears, leopards, lynxes, a giraffe, and a rhinoceros.  Doubtless this description of gifts was common.  Live beasts are the one article of curiosity and amusement that barbarians can offer to civilised nations.

[Assyria.]—­Mr. Fox Talbot thus translates (Journal Asiatic Soc., xix. 124) part of the inscription on the black obelisk of Ashurakbal found in Nineveh and now in the British Museum:—­

“He caught in hunter’s toils (a blank number) of armi, turakhi, nali, and yadi.  Every one of these animals he placed in separate enclosures.  He brought up their young ones and counted them as carefully as young lambs.  As to the creatures called burkish, utrati (dromedaries?), tishani, and dagari, he wrote for them and they came.  The dromedaries he kept in enclosures, where he brought up their young ones.  He entrusted each kind of animal to men of their own country to tend them.  There were also curious animals of the Mediterranean Sea, which the King of Egypt sent as a gift and entrusted to the care of men of their own land.  The very choicest animals were there in abundance, and birds of heaven with beautiful wings.  It was a splendid menagerie, and all the work of his own hands.  The names of the animals were placed beside them.”

[Rome.]—­The extravagant demands for the amphitheatre of ancient Rome must have stimulated the capture of wild animals in Asia, Africa, and the then wild parts of Europe, to an extraordinary extent.  I will quote one instance from Gibbon:—­

“By the order of Probus, a vast quantity of large trees torn up by the roots were transplanted into the midst of the circus.  The spacious and shady forest was immediately filled with a thousand ostriches, a thousand stags, a thousand fallow-deer, and a thousand wild boars, and all this variety of game was abandoned to the riotous impetuosity of the multitude.  The tragedy of the succeeding day consisted in the massacre of a hundred lions, an equal number of lionesses, two hundred leopards, and three hundred bears.”

Farther on we read of a spectacle by the younger Gordian of “twenty zebras, ten elks, ten giraffes, thirty African hyenas, ten Indian tigers, a rhinoceros, an hippopotamus, and thirty-two elephants.”

[Mexico.]—­Gomara, the friend and executor of Herman Cortes, states:  —­