From the earliest times the Egyptians seem to have reserved a particular place, both in their society and in their hearts, for the genus Canidae. Kings, great officers of state, and later, nobles and lesser men and women chose to be associated in close and affectionate relationship with dogs. It has been suggested that the founder population which formed the basis of the historic Egyptian community was the product of migrations of peoples seeking more amenable conditions in which to live their lives after the deterioration of the climates of the North African littoral and the increasing aridity of the Arabian desert. With these migrants came their dogs; the herders and hunters of the Sahara depicted dogs frequently in the scenes which they incised or painted on the rocky overhangs in which they habitually sheltered.
Four hunting hounds appear on an important early predynastic object, a pottery dish once in the Russian Golenishchef collection,18 on which the four dogs are shown with their handler, who holds them on leashes. The dogs are clearly ancestral to the ‘classic’ Egyptian hunting hound of dynastic times, known as tjesm.19 This is the alert, aristocratic, prick-eared hound which appears on countless Old Kingdom reliefs and which survived as a distinct and cosseted breed throughout Egyptian history. Its days of greatest favour, however, were during the centuries of the Old Kingdom. It is remarkable that dogs were being specifically managed at this early time; the earliest archaeological evidence of the domestication of the dog in Egypt comes from even earlier, from Merimde Bani Salame.
Dogs were given affectionate names by their human companions and were provided with burials which were intended to secure their survival in the Afterlife as reliably as the funerary customs of their masters would provide, that both dog and human would be together for ever.
The domestication of the dog probably occurred many times, in many different locations. It has been argued that it happened first in very remote times and that the history of dogs and humans are inextricably bound together.20 It is surely one of the most extraordinary aspects of early Egyptian society that, in the midst of creating the first nation-state, forming institutions of great complexity, eventually building the most enduring monuments in world history, uniquely amongst ancient societies the Egyptians brought the dog into a close association with them, making them part of their daily lives, in an enduring and affectionate companionship.
World History
