The Egyptians were especially familiar with the ways of animals and birds, and reproduced them with marvellous exactness.

The habit of minutely observing minor facts became instinctive, and it informed their most trifling works with that air of reality which strikes us so forcibly at the present day.
[Illustration: Fig.

254 .-- Spoon.] Household furniture was no more abundant in ancient Egypt than it is in the Egypt of to-day.

In the time of the Twelfth Dynasty an ordinary house contained no bedsteads, but low frameworks like the Nubian _angareb_; or mats rolled up by day on which the owners lay down at night in their clothes, pillowing their heads on earthenware, stone, or wooden head-rests.
There were also two or three simple stone seats, some wooden chairs or stools with carved legs, chests and boxes of various sizes for clothes and tools, and a few common vessels of pottery or bronze.

For making fire there were fire-sticks, and the bow-drill for using them (figs.