Reply #44: Thanks! A couple more...

[onager]

1. Most cat lovers know the ancient Egyptians had a cat goddess, Bast (also the goddess of sensual pleasure). Like most gods, she had quite a few different names.

According to my favorite Egyptian tour guide, one of those names translated to something like "funny face." The ancients would hold up statues of a grinning Bast to distract a woman going thru childbirth. And they also drug out the smilin' Bast statues a little while later, to distract the happy result of the childbirth when he or she started teething.

(My favorite Egyptian tour guide was a woman named Zahraa. Since her name means "flower" in Arabic, she used the name "Rose" for her Western customers. She had a degree in Egyptian history and spoke 4 languages. A fascinating person.)

2. One of my favorite places in Alexandria was the amazing Kom El Shoqafa catacombs. That's a huge underground Roman burial complex from about the 2d Century CE.

It was built at a time when the major religions in Egypt were "melting together," so it randomly mixes ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman religious symbology.

An incredibly weird place. A mural of Osiris preparing the dead is painted right above another mural of Persephone being dragged off to Hades.

Statues of the jackal-headed Egyptian god Anubis and the crocodile-headed god Sobek flank a burial chamber. But they are dressed as Roman soldiers, complete with armor and swords.

In one corner is a pile of randomly mixed human and horse bones - according to the experts, formerly a shrine to the Greek goddess Nemesis. Among other things, she was the patron of horse-racing and jockeys.

An Egyptian told me the human bones were those of jockeys who lost too many races. But I haven't checked that with Dr. Zahi Hawass yet.

There's a legend in Alexandria about a jockey who was badly hurt in a race, and told he would never race - or even walk - again. But he did heal and won the first race he entered after being injured. Since he had very long odds bet against him, he won a tremenous amount of money and used most of it building a new temple to Nemesis in Alexandria.

Being a Grumpy Atheist, I have to note that I can turn on the TV just about any Sunday morning and hear the same story. Only it ends with a new temple being built to Jesus instead of Nemesis.