Rodents

Rodents

Mice and rats

Mice and rats were terrible pests, causing great damage to human possessions, above all to the grain stores which, being built of unburned bricks, they could easily invade.
Even though they were a nuisance mice were a recognized, legitimate part of creation.

The frogs praise Hapy, the mice eat the emmer.
The oxen harvest the barley and emmer, the donkeys eat it.
The Instruction of Ankhsheshonq
M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature Vol. 3, p. 177

Mice being proverbially small and weak, figured frequently in animal fables [2], such as the tale of The Mouse as Vizier in which a mouse rose to greatness and proved itself to be morally inept, being condemned to live in holes underground ever after. In another story a mouse saved a lion by gnawing through the net in which he had been trapped [6]. In a third Herodotus recounts how a huge throng of mice saved Egypt by destroying the bow strings of an enemy army about to attack the country [7]. They are quite popular in cartoons as well [5] attacking cats or driving chariots. The Hellenists parodied the Iliad by creating figurines of a frog in armour and what is probably a mouse carrying a shield fighting each other with huge phalluses [3].

The jerboa

Jerboa From a relief in the mastaba of Ptahhotep
J. E. Quibell, The Ramesseum - The Tomb of Ptah-hetep, Egyptian Research Account, 2nd Memoir, pl.XXXII

The Lesser Egyptian or desert jerboa, (Jaculus jaculus), Egyptian HTs, a small mouselike rodent with long hindlegs and a long tail, hides during the day in a burrow. It feeds at night, mostly on seeds and plants, but occasionally it eats insects. Quaintly referred to as a species of kangaroo by one Francis Lister Hawks [1] who visited Egypt in the middle of the 19th century, it does move around the desert hopping like a kangaroo achieving leaps of up to three metres.
As far as Egyptology is concerned the only claim to fame of the jerboa is the suggestion that the top of the was-sceptre is a jerboa head [4], but this remains pure speculation.

[1] Francis Lister Hawks, The Monuments of Egypt: Or, Egypt a Witness for the Bible, 1850, p.137
[2] Lynn Meskell, Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt: Material Biographies Past and Present, 2004 Berg Publishers
[3] Karol Myasliwiec, The Twilight of Ancient Egypt: First Millennium B.C.E., 2000 Cornell University Press, p.202
[4] G. Maspero, History of Egypt, 2003 Kessinger Publishing, p.31
[5] Ann Rosalie David, The Pyramid Builders of Ancient Egypt: A Modern Investigation of Pharaoh's Workforce, 1996 Routledge, pp.87f.
[6] Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings: The Late Period, 1980 University of California Press, pp.156ff.
[7] Herodotus, Euterpe, [2.141.1]

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Update: April 2007