Roman Villa and mosaics--page 2

The so-called "Little Hunt"
The floor mosaic of one of the smaller rooms depicts the kinds of hunts which probably occurred in the vicinity of the villa--boar hunts, hare hunts, stags driven into a net, and bird hunts with falcons. On the right a ferocious boar is killed, saving the fallen huntsmen.
Realistic hunting details: an outdoor lunch, the killing of an hare; the decorative border
The "Great" Hunt A long corridor (about 200 feet) between the peristyle and the so-called audience hall has floor mosaics depicting the hunting and capture of wild animals, animals presumably destined for the games in Rome.
		An elephant covered with a net and pulled by chains
Thanks so much to Sven Silow (at sven@sdd.dart.se) who communicated this information. "The spotting indicates that it is a leopard (a cheetah has round black dots, a leopard has "rings"). Also, the leopard occurs already in northern Africa (it is however very close to extinction there nowadays - and the barbary lion [the North African lion subspecies that the Romans knew] is completely extinct since the 1920's). To find cheetahs you have to travel much further south. The gazelle is probably the Dorcas Gazelle (see http://www.pbs.org/sahara/wildlife/images/slideimages/dorcas138.jpg), the only North African antelope."
A lion and a cheetah(?) attack African antelope (gazelles?)

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