That rats and field-mice were sacred in Egypt, then, we may believe on the evidence of the Ritual, of Strabo, and of many relics of Egyptian art.  Herodotus, moreover, is credited when he says that the statue ’had a mouse on its hand.’  Elsewhere, it is certain that the story of mice gnawing the bowstrings occurs frequently as an explanation of mouse-worship.  One of the Trojan ‘mouse-stories’ ran—­That emigrants had set out in prehistoric times from Crete.  The oracle advised them to settle ‘wherever they were attacked by the children of the soil.’  At Hamaxitus in the Troad, they were assailed in the night by mice, which ate all that was edible of their armour and bowstrings.  The colonists made up their mind that these mice were ‘the children of the soil,’ settled there, and adored the mouse Apollo. {114a} A myth of this sort may either be a story invented to explain the mouse-name; or a Mouse tribe, like the Red Indian Wolves, or Crows, may actually have been settled on the spot, and may even have resisted invasion. {114b} Another myth of the Troad accounted for the worship of the mouse Apollo on the hypothesis that he had once freed the land from mice, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, whose pipe (still serviceable) is said to have been found in his grave by men who were digging a mine. {114c}

Stories like these, stories attributing some great deliverance to the mouse, or some deliverance from mice to the god, would naturally spring up among people puzzled by their own worship of the mouse-god or of the mouse.  We have explained the religious character of mice as the relics of a past age in which the mouse had been a totem and mouse family names had been widely diffused.  That there are, and have been, mice totems and mouse family names among Semitic stocks round the Mediterranean is proved by Prof.  Robertson Smith:  {115a} ’Achbor, the mouse, is an Edomite name, apparently a stock name, as the jerboa and another mouse-name are among the Arabs.  The same name occurs in Judah.’  Where totemism exists, the members of each stock either do not eat the ancestral animal at all, or only eat him on rare sacrificial occasions.  The totem of a hostile stock may be eaten by way of insult.  In the case of the mouse, Isaiah seems to refer to one or other of these practices (lxvi.):  ’They that sanctify themselves, and purify themselves in the gardens behind one tree in the midst, eating swine’s flesh, and the abomination, and the mouse, shall be consumed together, saith the Lord.’  This is like the Egyptian prohibition to eat ‘the abominable’ (that is, tabooed or forbidden) ’Rat of Ra.’  If the unclean animals of Israel were originally the totems of each clan, then the mouse was a totem, {115b} for the chosen people were forbidden to eat ’the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind.’  That unclean beasts, beasts not to be eaten, were originally totems, Prof.  Robertson Smith infers from Ezekiel (viii. 10, 11), where ’we find seventy of the