Professor Maspero has drawn attention to certain stelæ in the museum of Turin, which show how, even in the lower middle class, it was the animal itself and not the official god incarnated in it that was the object of worship. On one of them, which belongs to the age of the Eighteenth Dynasty, huge figures of a swallow and a cat are painted, with a table of offerings standing before them, as well as two kneeling scribes, while the accompanying inscriptions tell us that it was to “the good” swallow and the “good” cat, and not to any of the State gods who may have hidden themselves under these animal forms, that flowers were being offered and prayers made. On another stela we find two pet cats, who are sitting on a shrine and facing one another, and whom their mistresses—two of the women who wailed at funerals—adore in precisely the same language as that which was used of Osiris or Amon.(166) In the quarries north of Qurna is a similar representation of a cow and a cobra, which stand face to face with a table of offerings between them, while a worshipper kneels at the side, and a half-obliterated inscription contains the usual formulæ of adoration.(167) Still more curious is a stela, now in the museum of Cairo, on which an ox is represented inside a shrine, while underneath it is a Greek inscription declaring that the “Kretan” who had dedicated the monument could interpret dreams, thanks to the commandment of “the god.” The god, it will be noticed, is not Apis, but an ordinary ox.