“Do not put thyself in a beer-house.  An evil thing are words reported as coming from thy mouth when thou dost not know that they have been said by thee.  When thou fallest thy limbs are broken, and nobody giveth thee a hand.  Thy comrades in drink stand up, saying, ’Away with this drunken man.’”

The less thoughtful members of society, however, considered drunkenness as a very good joke, and even went so far as to portray it in their tomb decorations.  One sees men carried home from a feast across the shoulders of three of their companions, or ignominiously hauled out of the house by their ankles and the scruff of their neck.  In the tomb of Paheri at El Kab women are represented at a feast, and scraps of their conversation are recorded, such, for instance, as “Give me eighteen cups of wine, for I should love to drink to drunkenness:  my inside is as dry as straw.”  There are actually representations of women overcome with nausea through immoderate drinking, and being attended by servants who have hastened with basins to their assistance.  In another tomb-painting a drunken man is seen to have fallen against one of the delicate pillars of the pavilion with such force that it has toppled over, to the dismay of the guests around.

In the light of such scenes as these one may picture the life of an Egyptian in the elder days as being not a little depraved.  One sees the men in their gaudy raiment, and the women luxuriously clothed, staining their garments with the wine spilt from the drinking-bowls as their hands shake with their drunken laughter; and the vision of Egyptian solemnity is still further banished at the sight.  It is only too obvious that a land of laughter and jest, feasting and carouse, must be situated too near a Pompeian volcano to be capable of endurance, and the inhabitants too purposeless in their movements to avoid at some time or other running into the paths of burning lava.  The people of Egypt went merrily through the radiant valley in which they lived, employing all that the gods had given them,—­not only the green palms, the thousand birds, the blue sky, the hearty wind, the river and its reflections, but also the luxuries of their civilisation,—­to make for themselves a frail feast of happiness.  And when the last flowers, the latest empty drinking-cup, fell to the ground, nothing remained to them but that sodden, drunken night of disgrace which shocks one so at the end of the dynastic history, and which inevitably led to the fall of the nation.  Christian asceticism came as the natural reaction and Muhammedan strictness followed in due course; and it required the force of both these movements to put strength and health into the people once more.

[Illustration:  PL.  XI.  An Egyptian noble of the Eighteenth Dynasty
                       hunting birds with a boomerang and decoys. 
                       He stands in a reed-boat which floats amidst
                       the papyrus clumps, and a cat retrieves the
                       fallen birds.  In the boat with him are his
                       wife and son. 
                       —­FROM A THEBAN TOMB-PAINTING, BRITISH MUSEUM.]