Note 2 — Chapter III · AMONG THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS.

That the ancient Egyptians were a jovial people who sat long at the wine, we might infer from the caricatures which have been discovered in Egypt, if we did not know it from other sources of information. Representations have been found of every part of the process of wine-making, from the planting of the vineyard to the storing-away of the wine-jars. In the valuable works of Sir Gardner Wilkinson[2] many of these curious pictures are given: the vineyard and its trellis-work; men frightening away the birds with slings; a vineyard with a water-tank for irrigation; the grape harvest; baskets full of grapes covered with leaves; kids browsing upon the vines; trained monkeys gathering grapes; the wine-press in operation; men pressing grapes by the natural process of treading; pouring the wine into jars; and rows of jars put away for future use. The same laborious author favors us with ancient Egyptian caricatures which serve to show that wine was a creature as capable of abuse thirty centuries ago as it is now.