Part 31

Let us now examine the books of the ancients and their monuments; let us compare what they have said of the ibis, or the figures of it which they have traced, with the bird which we have been describing; and we shall see all our difficulties vanishing, and all the testimonies according with what is best of all for the purpose, the body itself of the bird preserved in the mummy.

“The most common ibises,” says Herodotus, (Euterpe, No. 76.) “have the head and the fore-part of the neck bare, the plumage white, excepting on the head, the nape, the ends of the wings and of the rump, which are black. Their beak and feet are similar to those of the other ibises.”

How does it happen that the travellers of our times do not make so good descriptions of the birds which they observe as that which Herodotus has made of the ibis? How could this description have been applied to a bird which has only the face bare, and which has that part of a red colour, to a bird which has the rump white, and not covered over at least as ours by the black feathers of the wings?

And yet this latter character was essential to the ibis. Plutarch (De Iside et Osiride) says, that the manner in which the white was cut by the black in the plumage of this bird, presented the form of a lunar crescent. It is, in fact, by the union of the black of the last quills, with that of the two ends of the wings, that there is formed, in the white, a large semicircular notch, which gives to the white the figure of a crescent.

It is more difficult to explain what he has intended to say, in averring that the feet of the ibis form an equilateral triangle with its beak. But we can understand the assertion of Ælian, that when it draws in its head and neck among its feathers, it represents, in some measure, the figure of a heart. It was on account of this, according to Horus Apollo (c. 35.), the emblem of the human heart.

From what Herodotus says of the nakedness of the throat, and of the feathers which covered the upper part of the neck, he appears to have had under his eyes a middle aged individual; but it is not the less certain, that the Egyptians also knew very well the individuals with the neck entirely bare. We see such represented from sculptures in bronze, in Caylus’s Collection of Egyptian Antiquities (vol. i. pl. x. no. 4., and vol. v. pl. xi. no. 1.) This last figure is even so like our bird represented in pl. v., that it might be said that it was taken from it.

The paintings of Herculaneum no longer leave any doubt on the subject. Plates 138 and 140 of David’s edition, and vol. ii. p. 315, pl. 59, and p. 321, pl. 60 of the original edition, which represent Egyptian ceremonies, shew several ibises walking in the court of the temples. The characteristic blackness of the head and neck are in particular recognised, and it is easily seen from the proportion which their figure bears to the persons in the painting, that it must have been a bird of half a metre at the most, and not of a metre, or thereabouts, like the Tantalus ibis.

The mosaic of Palestine, also presents in its middle part several ibises perched upon buildings. They differ in nothing from those of the paintings of Herculaneum. A Sardonyx of Dr Mead’s Collection, copied by Shaw, App. pl. v., and representing an ibis, seems to be a miniature of the bird which we have described. A medal of Adrian, in large bronze, represented in the Farnesian Museum, vol. vi. pl. xxviii. fig. 16, and another of the same emperor, in silver, represented in vol. iii. pl. vi. fig. 9, afford figures of the ibis, which, notwithstanding their smallness, are pretty like our bird.

With regard to the figures of the ibis, sculptured upon the plinth of the statue of the Nile, at Belvedere, and upon the copy of it at the garden of the Tuileries, they are not sufficiently finished to serve as proofs; but among the hieroglyphics of which the Institute of Egypt has caused impressions to be made upon the spot, there are several which distinctly represent our bird. In plate iii. fig. 1, we give one of these impressions which M. Geoffroy has had the politeness to communicate to us.

We insist particularly on this latter figure, because it is the most authentic of all, having been made at the time, and on the spot where the ibis was worshipped, and being cotemporary with its mummies; while those which we have cited above, having been made in Italy, and by artists who did not profess the Egyptian worship, might have been less faithful.

We owe to Bruce the justice of saying, that he recognised the bird which he describes under the name of Abou-Hannes, as the true ibis. He says expressly, that this bird appeared to him to resemble that which the mummy pitchers contained; and further, that this Abou-Hannes, or Father John, is very common on the banks of the Nile, while he never saw there the bird represented by Buffon, under the name of the White Ibis of Egypt.

M. Savigny, one of the naturalists of the expedition to Egypt, equally asserts his not having seen the Tantalus in that country, but he obtained a great number of our Numenius near the Lake Menzale, in Lower Egypt, and carried their skins with him.

The Abou-Hannes has been placed by Latham, in his Index Ornithologicus, under the name of Tantalus Æthiopicus; but he does not speak of Bruce’s conjecture respecting its identity with the ibis. The travellers before and after Bruce appear to have all been in error. Belon thought that the white ibis was the stork, in which he evidently contradicted all testimony on that head. No person has adopted his opinion in this matter, excepting the apothecaries, who have taken the stork for an emblem, because they have confounded it with the ibis, to which the invention of clysters is attributed.

Prosper Alpinus, who relates that this invention is due to the ibis, gives no description of this bird in his Medicine of the Egyptians. In his Natural History of Egypt, he speaks of it only after Herodotus, to whose account he only adds, without doubt from a passage of Strabo, which I shall mention farther on, that that bird resembles the stork in size and figure. He mentions his having been informed that white and black ones occurred in abundance on the edges of the Nile; but it is evident from his very expressions, that he did not believe it had been seen there.

Shaw says of the ibis, that it is at the present day excessively rare, and that he has never seen it. His Emseesy, or ox-bird, which Gmelin very improperly refers to the Tantalus Ibis, is of the size of the curlew, with the body white, and the beak and feet red. It frequents the meadows, where it follows the cattle; its flesh is not well tasted, and corrupts quickly. It is easy to see that this is not the Tantalus, and still less the Ibis of the ancients.

Hasselquist was not acquainted with the white Ibis nor with the black one, his Ardea Ibis is a small heron, which has the beak straight. Linnæus had acted very properly in placing it among the herons, in his tenth edition; but he erred, as I have said, in transporting it afterwards as a synonym to the genus Tantalus.

Demaillet conjectures that the ibis might be the bird peculiar to Egypt, and which was named Pharaoh’s Fowl (Chapon de Pharaon), and at Aleppo Saphan-bacha. It devours serpents. There are of them white, and white and black; and it follows, for more than a hundred leagues, the caravans which go from Cairo to Mecca, for the purpose of feeding upon the carcases of animals which are killed during the journey, while at any other time there is not one seen along this route. But the author does not consider this conjecture as certain; he even says, that we must give up understanding the ancients, when they have spoken so as not to be understood. He ends with concluding, that the ancients have perhaps indiscriminately comprehended under the name of Ibis, all birds which rendered to Egypt the service of clearing it of the dangerous reptiles which this climate produces in abundance, such as the vulture, the falcon, the stork, the sparrowhawk, &c.

He had reason not to regard his Pharaoh’s fowl as the ibis; for, although its description is very imperfect, and although Buffon fancied he recognised the ibis in it, it is easy to judge, as well as by what Pokocke says of it, that this bird must be a carnivorous one; and, in fact, we see from Bruce’s figure (Vol. v. p. 191. of the French edition), that Pharaoh’s fowl is nothing else than the rachama or the small white vulture with black wings (Vultur perenopterus, Linn.)--a bird very different from what we have proved above to be the ibis.

Pokocke says that it appears, from the descriptions which are given of the ibis, and from the figures which he has seen of it in the temples of Upper Egypt, that it was a species of Crane. I have seen, he adds, a number of these birds in the islands of the Nile; they were for the most part greyish. These few words suffice to prove that he did not know the ibis better than the others.

The learned have not been more happy in their conjectures than the travellers. Middleton refers to the ibis, a bronze figure of a bird, of which the beak is arched, but short, the neck very long, and the head furnished with a small crest, a figure which never had any resemblance to the bird of the Egyptians. This figure is, besides, not at all in the Egyptian style, and Middleton himself agrees that it must have been made at Rome. Saumaise upon Solinus says nothing that relates to the present question.

As to the black ibis, which Aristotle places only near Pelusium; it was long thought that Belon alone had seen it. The bird which he describes under this name is a species of curlew, to which he attributes a head similar to that of the cormorant, that is to say, apparently bald, a red beak, and feet of the same colour; but as he does not speak of the ibis in his journey, I suppose that it was only in France that he made this reference, and by comparison with mummies of the Ibis. What is certain is, that this curlew, with the beak and feet red, was not known in Egypt, but that our green curlew of Europe (Scolopax Falcinellus, Linn. Pl. Enl. 819.) is seen very commonly there, that it is even more abundant than the white numenius; and, as it resembles it in form and size, and, further, as its plumage may appear black, it can by no means be doubted that it was the true black ibis of the ancients. M. Savigny also made a drawing of it in Egypt, but from a young individual only. Buffon’s figure is from an adult bird; but its colours are too pale.

The error which prevails at present respecting the white ibis began with Perrault, who was also the first naturalist who made known the Tantalus ibis of the present day. This error, adopted by Brisson and Buffon, passed into the twelfth edition of Linnæus, where it is blended with that of Hasselquist, which had been inserted in the tenth, forming with it a compound altogether monstrous.

It was founded on the idea, that the ibis was essentially a bird that destroyed serpents, and upon this very natural conclusion, that, in order to enable it to devour these reptiles, it was necessary for it to have a sharp beak, more or less resembling that of the heron. This idea is even the only good objection that can be made against the identity of our bird to the ibis. How, it is urged, could a bird with a weak bill, a curlew, devour those dangerous reptiles?

It may be replied, that positive proofs, such descriptions, figures, and mummies, ought always to preponderate over accounts of habits too often imagined without any other motive than to justify the different worships rendered to animals. It might be added, the serpents from which the ibis delivered Egypt, are represented to us as very venomous, but not as very large. I have even obtained a direct proof that the birds preserved as mummies, which have had a beak precisely similar to that of our bird, were true serpent eaters; for I found in one of their mummies the still undigested remains of the skin and scales of serpents, which I have deposited in our anatomical galleries.

But, at the present day, M. Savigny, who has observed, in a living state, and more than once dissected our white numenius, the bird which every thing concurs to prove to have been the ibis, asserts that it only eats worms, fresh water shells, and other small animals of that sort. Supposing this fact to have no exception, all that can be concluded from it is, that the Egyptians, as has happened more than once to them and others, had invented a false reason for an absurd worship. It is true that Herodotus says, he saw, in a place on the borders of the desert, near Buto, a narrow gorge, in which a multitude of bones were heaped up, which he was informed were remains of winged serpents, that were seeking to penetrate into Egypt in spring, and that the ibises had arrested their passage. But he does not say that he had witnessed their combats, or that he had seen those winged serpents in their entire state. The whole of his testimony, therefore, reduces itself to this, that he had observed a heap of bones, which may very well have been those of the multitude of reptiles and other animals which the inundation destroyed every year, and whose bodies it would naturally carry to the places where it was stopped, to the borders of the desert, and which must by preference have accumulated in a narrow gorge.

However, it is equally from this idea of the combats of the ibis with serpents, that Cicero gives that bird a horny and strong beak. Having never been in Egypt, he imagined that this must have been the case by mere analogy.

I am aware that Strabo says somewhere, that the ibis resembles the stork in form and size, and that this author ought to have known it well, since he asserts that in his time the streets and cross-ways of Alexandria were so filled with them, that they proved a great inconvenience; but he must have spoken of it from memory. His testimony cannot be received when he contradicts all the rest, and especially when the bird itself is there to refute him.

In like manner, I shall not trouble myself about the passage where Ælian relates, according to the Egyptian embalmers, that the intestines of the ibis are eighty-six cubits long. The Egyptian priests of all classes have been guilty of so many extravagancies with regard to Natural History, that no great importance can be attributed to what one of their lowest classes might aver.