The drawings in this papyrus are not caricatures as we now understand the word. Caricature is an exaggerated portrait; it founds itself upon reality while turning it into ridicule by the accentuation of its most laughable features. But the drawings in this manuscript are inspired by the same ideas and the same intellectual bent as our modern caricatures. They respond to the universal taste of mankind for the mental relaxation afforded by parody, for the relief from the serious business of life which is to be found in comedy and burlesque. Ancient Egypt was a merry country. Its inhabitants were as pleased as children over the simplest and most homely jokes; jests, fantastic tales, and fables in which animals acted like men and women, were as popular with them as with their successors in civilisation. Their comic artists were especially fond of treating scenes of this last description, and their works often remind us of those produced in much later times for the illustration of Æsop or La Fontaine. [Illustration: FIG. 278.--Battle of the Cats and Rats. From Prisse.] Prisse reproduces the most interesting part of the Turin papyrus, and we have copied a fragment of his plate (Fig. 278). "In the first group, four animals--an ass, a lion, a crocodile, and a monkey--make up a quartette, playing on such musical instruments as were then in fashion. Next comes an ass dressed, armed, and sceptred like a Pharaoh; with a majestic swagger he receives the offerings brought to him by a cat of high degree, to whom a bull is proud to act as conductor. At the side a unicorn seems to threaten a kneeling cat with its harp..... The scenes drawn below, and on a smaller scale, are no more coherent than these. In the first place we see a flock of geese in open rebellion against its conductors--three cats, one of whom has fallen under the blows of the angry birds. Next we come to a sycamore in which an hippopotamus is perched; a hawk has climbed into the tree by means of a ladder and proceeds to dislodge him; finally, we have a fortress defended by an army of cats, who are without other arms than their claws and teeth, against a storming party of rats provided with arms offensive and defensive, and led by one of their own species, who is mounted on a chariot drawn by two greyhounds. "The artist's idea--at least in the lower part of the picture--seems to have been to paint the cats defeated by the animals upon which they prey. It is the world turned upside down, or if the painter must be credited with a deeper meaning, it is the revolt of the oppressed against the oppressor."[352] [352] PRISSE, _Histoire de l'Art Égyptien_, text, pp. 142, 143.