Sometimes a flock
consisted of more than 2,000; and in a tomb below the Pyramids, dating
upwards of 4,000 years ago, 974 rams are brought to be registered by
his scribes, as part of the stock of the deceased; implying an equal
number of ewes, independent of lambs.

A considerable quantity of meat was served up at those repasts, to
which strangers were invited, as among people of the East at the
present day; whose _azooma_, or feast, prides itself in the quantity
and variety of dishes, in the unsparing profusion of viands, and,
whenever wine is permitted, in the freedom of the bowl. An endless
succession of vegetables was also required on all occasions; and, when
dining in private, dishes composed chiefly of them were in greater
request than joints, even at the tables of the rich, and consequently
the Israelites, who, by their long residence there, had acquired
similar habits, regretted them equally with the meat and fish of
Egypt.

Their mode of dining was very similar to that now adopted in Cairo and
throughout the East; each person sitting round a table, and dipping
his bread into a dish placed in the centre, removed on a sign made by
the host, and succeeded by others, whose rotation depends on
established rule, and whose number is predetermined according to the
size of the party, or the quality of the guests.

Among the lower orders, vegetables constituted a very great part of
their ordinary food, and they gladly availed themselves of the variety
and abundance of esculent roots growing spontaneously, in the lands
irrigated by the rising Nile, as soon as its waters had subsided; some
of which were eaten in a crude state, and others roasted in the ashes,
boiled or stewed: their chief aliment, and that of their children,
consisting of milk and cheese, roots, leguminous, cucurbitaceous and
other plants, and the ordinary fruits of the country. Herodotus
describes the food of the workmen who built the Pyramids, to have been
the "_raphanus_, onions and garlic;" the first of which, now called
_figl_, is like a turnip-radish in flavor; but he has omitted one more
vegetable, lentils, which were always, as at the present day, the
chief article of their diet; and which Strabo very properly adds to
the number.

The nummulite rock, in the vicinity of those monuments, frequently
presents a conglomerate of testacea imbedded in it, which, in some
positions, resemble small seeds; and Strabo imagines they were the
petrified resi