easy to verify this supposition; but Mr. Sayce adds, 'mice were not
sacred in Egypt, nor were they used as symbols, or found on the
monuments.' To this remark we may suggest some exceptions. Apparently
this one mouse _was_ found on the monuments. Wilkinson (iii. 264) says
mice do occur in the sculptures, but they were not sacred. Rats,
however, were certainly sacred, and as little distinction is taken, in
myth, between rats and mice as between rabbits and hares. The rat was
sacred to Ra, the Sun-god, and (like all totems) was not to be eaten.
{113a} This association of the rat and the Sun cannot but remind us of
Apollo and his mouse. According to Strabo, a certain city of Egypt did
worship the shrew-mouse. The Athribitae, or dwellers in Crocodilopolis,
are the people to whom he attributes this cult, which he mentions (xvii.
813) among the other local animal-worships of Egypt. {113b} Several
porcelain examples of the field-mouse sacred to Horus (commonly called
Apollo by the Greeks) may be seen in the British Museum.

That rats and field-mice were sacred in Egypt, then, we may believe on
the evidence of the Ritual, of Strabo, and of many relics of Egyptian
art. Herodotus, moreover, is credited when he says that the statue 'had
a mouse on its hand.' Elsewhere, it is certain that the story of mice
gnawing the bowstrings occurs frequently as an explanation of
mouse-worship. One of the Trojan 'mouse-stories' ran--That emigrants had
set out in prehistoric times from Crete. The oracle advised them to
settle 'wherever they were attacked by the children of the soil.' At
Hamaxitus in the Troad, they were assailed in the night by mice, which
ate all that was edible of their armour and bowstrings. The colonists
made up their mind that these mice were 'the children of the soil,'
settled there, and adored the mouse Apollo. {114a} A myth of this sort
may either be a story invented to explain the mouse-name; or a Mouse
tribe, like the Red Indian Wolves, or Crows, may actually have been