The ancient Egyptian knowledge of the animal world clearly emerges from their artistic representations (te Velde 1980: 76). A detailed and careful study of artistic evidence dating from the Predynastic Period onwards has allowed the identification of over seventy species of birds (Houlihan 1986), twenty of fish (Brewer and Friedman 1989), and about one-hundred of mammals (Osborn and Osbornova 1998). A parallel, minor source is represented by hieroglyphs which include tiny but detailed representations of over one hundred animals and over sixty parts of animals (Gardiner 1957: 458-77). It is important to remember, though, that artistic representations such as scenes of daily life painted on tomb walls were meant to accompany the dead into the afterlife and not necessarily to be a faithful reproduction of the real world (Janssen 1990: 48); therefore, they may contain mistakes or incorrect representations of some details (Osborn and Osbornova 1998: vii).
The study of zooarchaeological remains provides information on the actual life and death of the ancient animals and, indirectly, also on their role in ancient society (Ikram 2005a). By combining various sources, it is possible to gain a relatively detailed picture of the animals that lived at the time of the Pharaohs (Houlihan 1996). In some cases, e. g. the cat, it is even possible to follow its role in society and religion from the earliest times to the Graeco-Roman Period (Malek 1993). Also in this case, as with botany, we do not know if and how the ancient Egyptians classified animals, beyond - one would imagine - the obvious, visible distinctions between flying creatures, fishes, herbivores vs. carnivores, etc.
As with human bodies, preparing an animal mummy implied a good knowledge of the internal structure of dead bodies. There is also evidence that the Egyptians had a clear idea of how live animal bodies functioned or malfunctioned: the way in which sick animals were cured suggests that a parallelism between human and animal organisms was clearly perceived (Petrie and Griffith 1898: 12-4; Ghaliounghui 1983).
In general it was evident to the ancient Egyptians that life (human, animal, and vegetal) always depended on the same basic rules. The fundamental role of sun, air, and water, for instance, is clearly acknowledged already in the earliest myth of the creation of the world (Quirke 1992: 21-50): no systematic written descriptions of flora and fauna have survived (if they ever existed), but the clear understanding of the basic mechanisms regulating the life of all creatures still emerges, even if indirectly, from the symbolic realm of religion.
World History
