TY - JOUR AU - Burton, Adrian AB - LIFE LINES LIFE LINES LIFE LINES you drive south the pyraIfmidyourDjoser –youfrom Cairo, usingcome great step world of the oldest standing building in the – as guide, will eventually upon the enigraise in captivity”, explains Duncan Bolton, Curator of Birds at Birdworld (Farnham, UK). “And if you remove their eggs to have matic necropolis of Saqqara. A complex of pyramids, them incubated – say by chickens – or remove their tombs, and catacombs, it holds the secrets of over 3000 chicks, they will lay again, maybe up to three times a years of Egyptian funerary and religious ceremony, stretch- year. So the breeding stock could in fact be, say, 1000 ing from the First Dynasty through Greco-Roman times. pairs for a 10 000 chick-per-year output. Even so, this Burial at Saqqara, however, was not just the privilege of enterprise would still need housing for 11 000 ibises in pharaohs or high officials; animals were interred there, total, plus any chicken surrogate parents.” too...in vast numbers. Hawks, cats, baboons, bulls, and So far, no physical evidence of installations that might other beasts were all mummified, probably to serve as have housed anything like such an undertaking has been votive TI - Lost livestock of the Nile JF - Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment DO - 10.1890/10.1.56 DA - 2012-02-01 UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/ecological-society-of-america/lost-livestock-of-the-nile-lssE3yJNrB SP - 56 VL - 10 IS - 1 DP - DeepDyve ER -