How the half-human apes of Central Africa came to be associated with Thoth we do not know. Between the baboons who sing hymns to the rising and setting sun and the moon, or the culture-god, there is little or no connection. But a curious biography found in a tomb at Assuan throws light upon it. Herkhuf, the subject of the biography, was sent by Hor-em-saf of the Sixth Dynasty on an exploring expedition into the Libyan desert south of the First Cataract, and he brought back with him a Danga dwarf “who danced the dances of the god,” like another Danga dwarf brought from Punt in the neighbourhood of Suâkim or Massawa in the time of the Fifth Dynasty. The dwarf was evidently regarded by Herkhuf as a species of baboon, if we may judge from the account he gives of the way in which he was treated; even to-day the ape in the zoological gardens of Giza is called by the lower classes at Cairo “the savage man.” Travellers have described the dancing and screaming of troops of apes at daybreak when the sun first lights up the earth, and it was natural for primitive man to suppose that the dancing was in honour of the return of the god of day. Dances in honour of the gods have been common all over the world; indeed, among barbarous and savage peoples the dance is essentially of a religious character. Even David danced before the ark, and boys still dance before the high altar in the cathedral of Seville. That dances are represented on the prehistoric pottery of Egypt, has been pointed out by M. de Morgan;(98) and since the Danga dwarf came from the half-mythical country in the south which was known to the Egyptians as “the land of the gods,” and where, too, the apes of Thoth had their home, it was reasonable to believe that he knew the dance that would be pleasing to the gods.(99) I believe, therefore, that the apes of Thoth were at the outset the dwarf-like apes or ape-like dwarfs who danced in his honour in the temple of Hermopolis. Gradually they were taken hold of by that symbolism which was inseparable from a religion so intimately bound up with a pictorial system of writing; from dancers they became the followers of the god, who sang to the rising and setting sun the hymns which Thoth had composed. But this would have been when the worship of the sun-god of Heliopolis had already spread to Hermopolis, and the cult of Thoth was mingling with that of Ra. The mutual influence of the theories of creation taught by the priests of the two cities shows at what a comparatively early date this would have happened. It is possible that there was actually a connection between the four baboons and the four elemental gods of Hermopolitan theology. But it was not in the way of development. It was rather that as the gods were four in number, the dancers in their temple were four also. To each god, as it were, an ape was assigned.