June 23, 2020 | The Triumphant Tale of the House Sparrow (2018)
I read the picture book The Triumphant Tale of the House Sparrow (2018), by Jan Thornhill. (I also read Thornhill’s The Tragic Tale of the Great Auk [2016].) In general, her books are informational, interesting, and nicely illustrated. In the house sparrow one, which takes the reader through the history of the house sparrow, there’s a spread referring to the Ancient Egyptians. The text in the spread reads:
Long before the Great Pyramid was built, the Ancient Egyptians were using a hieroglyph of a House Sparrow to describe something as “bad” or “evil.” So even that far back the bird must have been an agricultural pest. The Egyptians were expert bird-netters, though, and they would have caught large numbers in grain fields and nighttime roosts.
What did they do with all the sparrows they caught?
A clue lies inside a two-thousand-year-old falcon mummy. Scans have shown the remains of a House Sparrow in its stomach.
For centuries, mummified falcons, cats, crocodiles, ibises and other animals were purchased by Egyptians to offer to their gods in return for favors. So many of these animals were mummified — millions have been found — that they must have been raised for the purpose. And what better food for a captive cat or falcon than a common, fast-breeding field pest like the House Sparrow?
And if you search on the Internet for “sparrow” and “hieroglyph,” for example, you’ll find quite a few images of these birds roosting in walls filled with hieroglyphs.
[Screenshots of pages from The Triumphant Tale of the House Sparrow (2018); other images from stock websites, as indicated]
