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Archaeologist, Art Historian, Sometime Curator, and Ocassional Classicist
Dear Henry Colburn, Fascinating to read your finds…the cat and mouse, drawn by perhaps a schoolboy, seems to me to show a mouse waving the skeletal back bone, head and tail still connected, of a fish, which he is offering the cat, maybe in exchange.
If the artist had wanted to draw a flower stem I feel they would have been able to represent leaves easily.
However, as you have seen the original close-to and I live in Dorset, England, too far away to check it, I merely suggest this for you to consider.
This is an intriguing suggestion! I reckoned this object to be a flower because they are very commonly held by seated figures in Egyptian art in all periods, especially in scenes of the sort I think our artist is parodying.