There are a few traces of the existence of animal worship under the early dynasties; they are but few, however, and, so far as I am aware, no notice of sacred animals occurs between the age of Khufu and the reign of Rameses II. Nor are the gods depicted in the memorial chambers of the departed before the times of the eighteenth dynasty. Under Thothmes III., their figures are constantly met with, often with the head of the symbolic creature that was their emblem (see p. 119). The reason for the selection is often plain. The bull or the ram might denote undaunted strength and the protection of the weak, the hawk unerring sight, the crocodile terror, the scarabæus tender foresight and unwearied care for its offspring. And not only were the gods represented under the form of these and other objects, but the living animals themselves were symbolic and sacred. Each district had its own sacred animal, fed and tended with the devoutest care. Certain of them, however, attained to far greater celebrity than the rest—the Ram of Mendes; Mnevis, the bull sacred to Ra, at Heliopolis; and, above all, Apis, the bull sacred to Ptah, at Memphis. The eldest son of Rameses, named Khamus, who was governor of Memphis, was also high priest of Ptah, and more especially under his form or manifestation as Apis. It requires very little knowledge of human nature, and very little acquaintance with history, to feel assured that the crowds who gathered round these symbolic creatures would regard them with superstitious reverence, and that to not a few the animal would be no longer a symbol but a god. Animal worship grew and developed immensely after the days of Rameses. At a later period we find Greek and Roman travellers noticing it with curiosity or contempt. Herodotus and Strabo saw the sacred crocodiles in the Fayoum, adorned with golden ornaments, and fed with the flesh of the sacrifices. Diodorus tells us of the furious wrath of Egyptian villagers against a Roman soldier who had killed a cat. The comic writers of Greece and the satirists of Rome made merry over these peculiar deities. ‘You are never done laughing every day of your lives at the Egyptians,’ says an early Christian writer to his heathen contemporaries. Philo, the Jewish philosopher of Alexandria, tells us that foreigners coming to Egypt knew not what to do for laughter at the divine animals, but that in the end they were themselves overpowered by the superstition. There were not wanting those who, acknowledging that the animals were to be regarded merely as symbolic, based their arguments against the custom on that very ground.[67] The days of foreign criticism were, however, as yet in the distant future when the kings of the nineteenth dynasty were on the throne.