Budge_Ethiopic_Alexander

ORIGIN OF THE ALEXANDER STORY. XIII
water and straightway brought up the young man.'
When the king had made some remark, Aba-aner
picked up the crocodile, which at once turned into
the small waxen crocodile which it was originally,
and again when he ordered it to devour the
young man, it once more became a living reptile,
and, seizing the young man, made its way to the
water, and disappeared with him. The faithless
wife was burnt. The principal actors in this story
are said to have flourished during the rule of the
Ilird dynasty of Egypt, nearly four thousand years
before Christ, and it is a noteworthy fact that
the narrative mentions the ebony and metal
box and the making of a waxen crocodile in a
way which seems to shew that their owner was
in the habit of usinsf the box and the wax
frequently.
The custom of trying to do harm to people by waxen n-
means of waxen images is proved to have existed in MWdyEm-
later days by a papyrus, first described by Chabas," p"'^'
which records that a man was prosecuted in an
Egyptian court of law for having made figures of
men and women in wax, by which he caused
sundry and divers pains and sicknesses to the
living beings whom they represented.
An example of the use of waxen figures for
causing^ dreams is griven in Pseudo-Callisthenes
o o
' Here we are forcibly reminded of Jonah's miraculous
escape from the whale.
^ He Papyrus Magique Harris, p. 170.