This terse epigram seems foreshadowed by Homer, who calls the river (?) ????pt??, and the country (?) ????pt??, thus indicating correctly that Egypt is only the Nile valley.[748]

The all importance of the river to the country meets early and general recognition. In a hymn[749] it is lauded as “the creator of all things good”: solemn rituals from the earliest down to Mohammedan times implored “a good Nile”: temples in its honour existed at Memphis, Heliopolis, and Nilopolis: at Silsileh ceremonies and sacrifices,[750] from time immemorial, welcomed its annual rise; magnificent festivals were universal throughout the land.[751]

To Egypt, river or country, goes out the undying reverence of all Anglers. Whether Egyptian or the Sumerian civilisation were the older; which of the two have left the earlier signs of a written language[752]; whether the Egyptian surpassed the Assyrian empire in extent or magnificence—about all these points “disquisitions” (in Walton’s word) have not ceased.

But to Egypt belongs the glory of holding in future and happy thrall world-wide subjects, who salute, or rather should salute (had previous writers not been reticent on the point) her (and not Assyria) as the historical mistress and foundress of the art of Angling.

In my Assyrian and Jewish chapters I stress the remarkable absence, despite the close and long connections of these nations with the land of the Nile, of anything graven or written which indicates knowledge of the Rod. In Egypt two instances of Angling are depicted: the first[753] probably (to judge by his place on the register) by a servant or fishing-ghillie as early as c. 2000 b.c., the second by a magnate some 600 years later.[754]

The argument of silence—because a thing is not depicted or mentioned it therefore never existed—often pushes itself unjustifiably. May not absence of the Rod be an instance? Had Mesopotamia (it may be further urged) been endowed with the atmospherical dryness of Egypt and the consequent preservative qualities of its soil instead of a widely-spread marsh-engendered humidity, would not scenes of Angling there probably meet our eyes? Humidity may account for great losses in Mesopotamia, but its toll in the Delta of Egypt was also heavy. This large area has yielded, compared with the Upper Kingdom, inappreciable returns.

But even if the country of the Two Rivers had possessed the same climatic conditions as the Upper Kingdom, it could never have become to the same extent the historical storehouse for posterity of the works and records of ancient Man.

Difference in religious belief, for one thing, precluded. The Sumerians, the first settlers recognised by history in the plains of Shinar, conceived (as did their successors the Babylonians and Assyrians) the next world to be a forbidding place of darkness and dust beneath the earth, to which all, both good and bad, descended. Hence burial under the court of a house or the floor of a room, often without any tomb or coffin, or much equipment for the life beyond the grave, was sufficient.

In belief and equipment the Egyptians differed toto orbe. For them after death was pre-ordained a life to obtain which the body must be preserved from destruction; otherwise it hastened to dissolution and second death, i.e. annihilation. To avoid this fate, they resorted to permanent tombs, embalmment, and mummification.

But as the Double, or Ka, of the departed (unlike the Soul, or Ba, which fared forth to follow the gods) never quitted the place where the mummy rested, daily offerings of food and drink for its sustenance had to be placed in the chapel chamber of the richer tombs. Sooner or later came the time when for reasons of expense, or other, the dead of former generations found themselves neglected, and the Ka was reduced to seeking his food in the refuse of the town. To obviate such a desecration, and ensure that the offerings consecrated on the day of burial might for all time preserve their virtue, the mourners hit upon the idea of drawing and describing them on the walls of the chapel.

Furthermore to make homelike and familiar his new abode, or the “Eternal House” (in contrast to which the houses of the living were but wayside inns) elaborate precautions were taken. We find depicted on the walls of the chapel the lord of the domain, surrounded by sights and pursuits familiar to him when alive. “The Master in his tomb,” writes Maspero, “superintends the preliminary operations necessary to raise the food by which he is to be nourished in the form of funerary offerings: scenes and implements of sowing, harvesting, hunting, fishing meet his eye.”

From these representations of actual life, intended for the comfort of the dead, we, the living, are enabled not only to reconstruct in part the manner and social economy of the Ancient Egyptians, but also to gather, aided by excavated tackle, fairly accurate knowledge of their various devices for catching fish. And so to the religious conception which fostered the adornment of the tombs the gratitude of all fishermen is due, and should be deep.

If the god Hapi, who is represented with the girdle of a fisherman round his loins, and bearing lotus flowers, fowl, and fish, was hymned by the people as “the Creator of all things good,” to the Father of Rivers[755] the Father of History renders tribute for his gift of one “thing good” which furnished to all, bar kings and priests, a stable and staple food, fish.

Its economic importance can hardly be over-rated. Testimony as to its cheapness and abundance is not wanting. Of such is the wail of the poorer folk that the price of corn might be that of fish.[756] Not less impressive rings the plaint of wandering Israel—even heaven-sent manna apparently palls!—“we remember the fish we did eat in Egypt for naught.” The Egyptians accounted the fish plague, next to the death of the firstborn, as direst in result.

Confirmatory witnesses are Diodorus Siculus, who notes the great number and the many varieties of fish found in the Nile,[757] and Ælian, who neatly and truly characterises the aftermath of the annual inundation as “a harvest of fish.”[758] Evidence, again, of “a plenty” of fish, its pursuit, and its copious consumption fronts us in the prehistoric kitchen-middens and in the bone or horn harpoons of pre-dynastic graves. Later, the frequent tomb fishing-scenes and some textual notices attest absence of dearth.

The numerous slate palettes in the pre-dynastic graves furnish Mr. Bates with further proof, and with a new theory, which seems to me, if ingenious, too ingenuous and too far-fetched.

The palettes,[759] almost invariably presenting the profile of only those fishes, birds, or beasts that historic men pursued for food, were intended (by the aid of colours extracted from the malachite, galena, etc., crushed upon them) to establish an unpalpable, but, in human eyes, very serviceable connection between the fisher and his prey.

One method of such connection consists in creating a likeness of the intended quarry. Such a likeness, by the belief that the simulacrum is actively en rapport with that which it represents, bestows on the possessor power over the original. “Cases,” Bates correctly adds, “of this sort are the commonplaces of imitative magic.” Usually a hunting or fishing amulet which simulates the form of the quarry was worn by the owner, or attached to his gear.

The palettes themselves played the part of mere paint-stones, but their supposed resident power might very efficaciously be transferred to its proprietor by means of the paint ground upon it.

“Persons who go in pursuit of the crocodile,” says Pliny, “anoint themselves with its fat.”[760] In the same way as the crocodile-hunter thus assimilates himself to his quarry by a direct contagion, so the owner of the palette could possess himself of the power in the slate likeness by painting himself with the “medicine” ground upon it.

The validity, or otherwise, of the suggestion must be determined by expert mythologists. The theory, to my mind, appears too far-fetched, and breaks down from the introduction of an additional agency.

The fisher wearing an amulet or attaching a charm to his tackle, and the fat-anointed crocodile hunter both supposedly have direct connection with his quest.

But Bates’s solution demands four agents at work, the fisher, the prey, the portrayed profile of the latter, and the palette; from these the fisher extracts the desired power by decorating himself with the paint made out of a fifth agency, the galena, etc. Here exists no direct contagion as with the crocodile hunter, or direct connection as with the amulet-wearing piscator. That such early men as the pre-dynasties, though possessed of no insignificant a culture, should reason by causation at a fifth remove, seems lacking in probability, especially in a matter of primitive semi-religious belief, which is ever slow, ever resentful of change.

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“I tell you that the fisherman suffers more than any other. Consider, is he not toiling on the River? He is mixed up with the crocodiles: should the clumps of papyrus give way, then he shouts for help.”[761]

Now let us see by what implements and devices this “plenty of fish” was made to pay toll.

The documentary evidence on Egyptian fishing is so slight and fragmentary that were it not for extant implements and representations of fishing scenes its technical history could not be reconstructed even partially. The implements carry us back to about the beginning of the pre-dynastic age, and constitute our principal source of information regarding Nilotic fishing.

But from the beginning of the Old Kingdom until the Roman period the material remains dwindle, while the tomb scenes increase in importance. Later—perhaps in part owing to the changes in the interests of the Egyptian artist—the implements themselves again become of prime significance.[762]

It is impossible in Egypt, or elsewhere, to allot definite priority to Spear (or Harpoon), Net, Hook and Line, or Rod. The fact that all four methods were c. 2000 b.c. in synchronous use establishes merely a date a quo, a date which indicates (if a first appearance really prove anything) that Egypt in Angling by over a thousand years precedes China, where the earliest mention occurs, c. 900 b.c.[763]

The Spear and the Harpoon, with their cousin the Bident, concern us first. Of the Trident there seems to be neither example or representation. Priority of use may possibly be conceded to the Spear in PalÆolithic times. The fact that in Egypt we are dealing with an age, the Copper, separated from the PalÆolithic by the New Stone era, prevents even a guess as to priority on the Nile. Egypt, it is true, bequeaths us the oldest historical as apart from archÆological data, but these are merely great-great-grandchildren of the dÉbris data of France, and comparatively modern.

Then again, in Europe the Harpoon was rarely combined with objects of the Copper Age, in Egypt frequently.

The Harpoon has been divided by Bates, but, I think, somewhat needlessly, into two types.

(1) A spear barbed unilaterally or bilaterally.

(2) A similar Spear which has its head so socketed as to come free from the shaft when the object has been struck, the quarry being thereafter retrieved by means of a line made fast to the head itself.

One of the simplest specimens is, perhaps, that figured by Reisner,[764] while two by Petrie[765] are, though probably pre-dynastic, of more elaborate workmanship.

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To the latter the earliest Harpoons in Egypt appear to be the three-toothed bone Harpoons of the first prehistoric age. The representation of launching the Harpoon at fish is one of the commonest in tombs from the Vth to the XVIIIth Dynasties. The truth seems to be that the Harpoon as a means of livelihood ceased in the second prehistoric age, but as an instrument of sport lasted much later, though in the latest paintings it may be only a religious archaism.[766]

Seventy years have failed to displace substantially Wilkinson’s statements: fish-spearing from bank or papyrus punt was the sportsman’s method: the spear or bident,[767] about nine to twelve feet long, was thrust at passing fish: to it a long line (held in the left hand) was usually fastened for the purpose of recovering the weapon and the fish, if struck. Sometimes the weapon was feathered like an arrow (the author was possibly misled by or is alluding to the hieroglyph

, or was just like a common spear.

If the statement be correct that “the bilaterally barbed Harpoon is almost unknown before the Middle Kingdom times,”[768] we are faced by the remarkable fact of a weapon found again and again in the Magdalenian epoch of PalÆolithic Man—each reader can supply his own conjecture how many millenniums before—being absent in a culture familiar with Copper Age hooks and harpoons.

But hold what view we may as to the original priority of implement, examples of Spear-Harpoons are found in Egypt, at any rate, much earlier than those of either the Net or the Hook.

An illustration or two will serve to confirm the sporting use of the Harpoon, as advanced by Wilkinson and Petrie.

The first, a fine representation, depicts, in fig. 3, probably Khenemhetep standing in a papyrus boat in the act of spearing two large fish; beside him stands an attendant holding a bident Harpoon and a Reel unfixed.

In fig. 4 (an enlargement in colour of the preceding plate) the barbed heads transfix the heads of two big fish: an attendant holds a spare harpoon and a reel of cord evidently meant to revolve in its handle.[769]

In the second[770] “Senbi, accompanied by his wife Meres, stands in a skiff constructed of reeds spearing fish. The subject is depicted over and over again in the tomb-chapels, but here it is imbued with new life. How realistic are the monster hippopotami who bellow, and display their gleaming white tusks, as Senbi comes skimming over the water in his frail canoe! The inscription over Senbi fishing runs as follows: ‘Spearing fish by him who is honoured by Osiris, Lord of the Western Desert, the Nomarch, the Superintendent of the Priests, Senbi the Justified.’”

Before passing to the Hook, a few words as to the Reel. Although Wilkinson would limit its use to Hippopotami, as in Khenemhotep’s scene, may we not fairly deduce its employment also in the spearing of large fish?

The surprise sometimes expressed as to the absence of any evidence that the Reel did duty with the Rod is quite superfluous. The Line of the Nile, and, indeed, of all Europe till the seventeenth century, was the tight, not the running Line.[771] A possibility, but not a probability, of a Reel being used by a man catching a catfish with line and hook has been detected in Plate 141 of the famous tomb of Ti, which shows the right hand carrying what may be merely a club, or more likely a stick for the line to be wound on, when not in use.[772]

From the beginning of the Middle Kingdom onward the Reel, of which a fine example comes from Beni Hasan,[773] appears to have found employment against Hippo. From the stick on which the hanks of cord were wound, perhaps, came its invention.[774] The most developed form shows merely an axle run through holes in the ends of a semi-circular handle. The ends of the axle were set in handles, which to some extent facilitated the process of winding up.[775]

The pursuit of the Hippo originated, like that of the fox in England, from economic causes, viz. the destruction wrought on crops, not on flocks and poultry. The beast in pre-dynastic times existed in Lower Egypt, but by the end of the Old Kingdom seems to have retreated to Upper Ethiopia. Pliny, however, speaking of its ravages at night on the fields indicates its survival above SaÏs.[776]

Diodorus Siculus,[777] after surmising that if the Hippo were more prolific things would go hard with the Egyptian farmer, furnishes the details, but not the locus of a hunt. “It is hunted by many persons together, each being armed with iron darts.” With the substitution of copper harpoons for iron darts, the description applies almost verbatim to some of the hunting scenes of the Old Kingdom.[778]

The Hook.—At the end of the pre-dynastic or beginning of the First Dynastic period the Hook, fashioned in no rude method, and wrought of no primitive material, but of copper, makes its appearance.

From this it is clear that Egypt (a) can lay no claim to have invented this method, and (b) had travelled many stages on the long road of piscatorial invention. The complete absence in the Nile Valley of hooks of bone, flint, or shell which occur in so many neolithic centres in other parts of the world adds confirmatory evidence.

In Egypt no records of the progenitor of this copper Hook survive. No family tree helps us, as elsewhere, to surmise whether the thorn, the flint, or the shell constituted the material of the first hook, for no non-metallic prototype has come to light. The numerous bone and ivory points, all more or less like the slender rod or pin of ivory shown in El Amrah and Abydos,[779] may, perhaps, indicate the gorges used by fishermen in pre-dynastic times. The absence, however, in the above example of any indentation in the middle, round which the line was frequently attached, tends (in my view) rather to negative the suggestion.

The earliest hooks were of simple shape. The point was barbless. The head, which in all cases lay in the plane of the hook, was formed by doubling over the end of the shank against the outside of the latter, so as to form a stop or an eye, which might, or might not, have been an open one.[780] Their length (varying from 2 to 6 cms.), if contrasted with the bronze hooks of the Swiss Lakes, is short in proportion to their width from the outside of the point to the outside of the shank.[781]

The XIIth Dynasty displays a few barbed hooks alongside barbless ones. One of the latter, belonging to Petrie, excites our interest, for the string of its attachment (some nine inches in length) is composed of double stout twist, while another proves itself the ancestor—in fact itself is—the Limerick hook with a single barb.

By the XVIIIth Dynasty barbed hooks, usually of bronze, largely predominate. Instead of being headed up in the older fashion they show the end of the shank expanded, so as to form a small flange in a plane at right angles to that of the hook. A line bent on the shank below this flange (even if slight), and drawn hard up against it had the advantage of chafing less than when made fast to a hook of the earlier type. The New Kingdom hooks, which continue scarcely altered in Roman times, are well designed, but their barbs are less intelligently placed than are those of the Middle Kingdom.[782]

But even in Roman times several types of hook, fairly well distributed in the Northern Mediterranean, seem unknown in Egypt; for instance, double hooks, barbed or barbless, of the Bronze Age in Switzerland, hooks with a split eye or an eye made by twisting the end of the shank round itself (as found in Crete) and many others are yet to seek.[783]

The cluster or gang hook early confronts us in the tomb of Gem-Ni-Kai.[784] The fisherman here extends his index finger to feel the faintest bite: below the water the line ends in a cluster of five hooks, one of which holds a large fish.

The ancient monuments sometimes portray fishing from a boat with hand-lines. Those of the Old Kingdom as often as not depict the fisher as an elderly peasant, presumably no longer equal to the brisker business of hauling a heavy seine.

Occasionally two lines are employed, as in the scene which Blackman[785] describes: “A small reed skiff, containing two men, one of whom, lolling at ease in the stern, has just secured a catch upon one of his lines, while his companion, standing upright in the bow, is pulling his loaded net out of the water.”

Another instance of hand-lining comes from Beni Hasan.[786] The same register contains a representation which is not only the earliest (c. 2000 b.c.) of fishing with a Rod known in the whole world, but is also (with the exception of that from the tomb of Kenamun at Thebes[787]) the only depictment, I believe, of the Rod till we reach Greece about the sixth century b.c.

Unless the passion for sport pure and simple dominated rich and poor alike, we can fairly surmise that Angling yielded good results. The man in the Beni Hasan illustration, whether a fishing ghillie, or a professional fisherman belonging to the province which the tomb’s owner governed, or a peasant fishing on his own, is not merely posing for his picture.

The Theban illustration (some six hundred years later) squares with Wilkinson’s statement “sometimes the angler posted himself in a shady spot by the water’s edge, and, having ordered his servants to spread a mat upon the ground, sat upon it as he threw his line: some, with higher ideas of comfort, used a chair, as stout gentlemen now do in punts upon retired parts of the Thames.” The beat of our piscator, whose fishing lines should be closely studied, was probably not on “a retired part” of the Nile, but on one of his own vivaria, which, as in Assyria and Italy, ensured a supply of fresh fish in hot weather.

The lengths of the Rod and of the Line, if we may compute them by the height of the Anglers, assimilate fairly well to the eight cubits or six feet of Ælian’s Macedonian weapon some two millennia later.

Figures of fish caught by the mouth indicate baits, but no data enable us to identify their nature. Wilkinson’s statement “in all cases they adopted a ground bait, without any float” leaves itself open to question. In the Beni Hasan scene of Angling, which he entitles Fishing with Ground Bait, neither the hieroglyph attached nor anything else shows that, although in this instance no float appears, the bait was resting at the bottom, and not moving in the stream. The tombs generally may have led him to conclude that floats were unknown, but a netting scene in the Tomb of Ti shows a large float, presumably indicating the exact spot occupied by the trap in the water.[788]

The ancient Egyptian, if he employed the practice of his modern successor, used scraps of meat, lumps of dough, minnows, and bits of fish.[789] In connection with the last two a very curious passage in the Book of the Dead runs, “I have not caught fish with bait made of fish of their kind.”[790]

Such was the plea by the soul of the dead man not to be punished for what seemingly was a heinous sin. It is hard to discover where the enormity of the crime arises.[791] As most fishes are cannibals, the bait here presents one of their natural foods. In the case of an artificial bait, which from the fish’s point of view amounts to cheating and deception, the punishment presumably fitted the crime, for which no prayer could atone, no pardon be possible!

Perhaps this conception indirectly caused and still causes the abstention from such lures as the artificial fly, which the native even now generally rejects. The implied prohibition, if the whole passage be not metaphorical, probably sprang from and is a relic of Totemism, which widely prevailed in early times.

The Net: the first examples, owing to their more perishable materials, naturally post-date those of the Harpoon and the Hook, but occur in representations far earlier than either. The suggestion that a part of a Net figures in the hieroglyph of the scenes from the Royal Tombs at Abydos[792], and so denotes its appearance in the 1st Dynasty, carries no conviction.

Close inspection shows the object to be a bag, or piece of cloth. The Net’s delineation by an artist at the end of the IIIrd or very beginning of the IVth lies not open to cavil.[793]

Peculiar importance pertains to this scene, because it is the first portrayal of the Net in Egypt, and possibly the very first representation connected with fishing the whole world over. It, moreover, as an illustration merely of fish, antedates (if avoiding the Scylla of Petrie’s and the Charybdis of Albright’s chronologies we steer by Lepsius’s chart) the famous Sumerian scene of Gilgamesh carrying fish, by some four centuries.[794]

The tomb of Zau furnishes one or two representations of special interest. Apart from that of Zau himself “dressed in sporting attire” and spearing fish from a papyrus skiff, the artist in another has let himself go more freely.

Not content to show what is happening above the surface of the pool, he breaks through all embarrassing congruities in order to display the crowded scene below, without which his subject would not have been completely set forth. The waters extend also to the left, where seven fishermen haul into a boat a drag-net full of fish, which include, as in the tomb of Aba, eight different species. Hippopotami and crocodiles do not fail to appear: even the humble frog, who sits among the water reeds, is remembered.[795]

Netting obtained more widely than its depictments, in proportion to those of Harpooning and Angling, indicate. Representations of the latter methods occur nearly always in the durable tomb-chapels of the rich, who from their ampler leisure more often ensued sport, while the professional fisherman, like his Greek and Roman brother, came of the tribe whose badge was poverty. Then, too, it must be remembered that the Netsmen mainly inhabited the Delta, which from reasons of humidity has yielded fewer pictures of life.

Practically every kind of Net known to the ancient world found employment in Lower Egypt, as the list drawn up by Julius Pollux, by birth himself a Deltan, makes clear. The representations give us many Nets. The hand, the double-hand, the cast (most rarely), the stake, the seine, etc., all find place. Weights of stone, but none of lead (according to Bates), meet our eyes in the monuments.[796]

Netting needles range from pre-dynastic to Roman times. The first, of a very simple type, are merely flat pieces of bone, pointed at each end, and pierced in the middle.[797] Net-making and Net-mending scenes are not absent. In one of the latter the artist, of naturalistic turn, shows an old fisherman mending a hand-net, and gripping the end with his toes, while a lad, preparing twine, rubs his spindle on his thigh.[798]

Actual specimens of Net twine prepared from flaxen and other vegetable fibres were discovered at Kahun in balls of two-strand and of three-strand string of the XIIth Dynasty. Fragments of Nets “having ½ to ¾ inch (1·2 to 1·9 cm.) mesh, the smallest being ? inch (say 0·3 cm.) square,” came to hand at the same locality.[799]

Kahun yielded also some fragments of later, probably XVIIIth Dynasty, Nets, with meshes from 0·5 to 1·5 cm. and made of coarser twine than the earlier examples,[800] whose fineness of mesh tallies with the small size of some of the ancient needles.

Weels or wicker fisher traps (especially in the Old Kingdom) come down to us either small (about 1 m. 50 long), simply constructed, and capable of manipulation by two men, or very large, of more complex fashioning internally, and requiring several men to handle.[801]

Whether the Egyptians employed poisons, like most of the Mediterranean nations, I have not discovered. As examples, they are impossible of survival; for depictment of their actual use not even the boldest Nilotic Cubist would have been adequate, unless he imitated the Athenian artist by hieroglyphing “These be poisons”!

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The statement, “the Nile contains all sorts and kinds of fish,”[802] must in an age of scientific enumeration be taken with several grains of salt. The total for the whole country, riverine and marsh, reaches but seventy-one species, of which only two, Mormurops anguillaris and Haplochilus schÆlleri, are peculiar to Egypt.[803] A score or so find representation in ancient times; but identification is far from easy, and is in some cases, e.g. the Mullets, only possible generically.

In scenes of the return of Hatshepsut’s expedition from the land of Punt the drawings of the fishes are so characteristic that Prof. Doenitz has been enabled to determine their species, and identify them as belonging to the Red Sea. The powers of observation in the artists accompanying the ships demonstrate careful training. But I cannot, since the eyes of the Solea are similar, endorse the eulogism bestowed in the case of a sole, unless it were a freak, “one eye is drawn larger than the other, showing a fine observation of Nature!”[804]

The priests, the King, and the commonalty in some cases eschewed fish.

Priestly abstention was by no means uncommon, as some of the temples of Poseidon[805] demonstrate. In Egypt the observance was strict, at Askalon the reverse. Plutarch,[806] confirming and amplifying Herodotus,[807] writes:—“The priests indeed entirely abstain from all sorts: therefore on the ninth day of the first month (Thoth), when all the rest of the Egyptians are obliged by their religion to eat a fried fish before the doors of their houses, they only burn them, not tasting them at all, assigning as their reasons two, the second of which—indeed, the most manifest and obvious—is that fish is neither a dainty, nor even a necessary kind of food.”[808]

But by the priests of Atargatis, to whose subjects ichthyophagia was under pain of blains, boils, and other dire diseases absolutely forbidden, fish boiled and roasted were daily offered, and by them daily eaten.[809]

The religious ceremony in Thoth may have been merely a later aspect of a taboo once possibly universal among the class from which the priesthood largely drew, or may, perhaps, have been prompted by the desire of obtaining a good fish harvest. Apart from the uneconomic depletion of food entailed by the prescribed eating, the killing of “the children” or possessions of the deity seems hardly the best way to secure fruition of such desire.

If, however, the feast survived as a relic of Totemism, the ceremony may possibly come within Robertson-Smith’s conception of the origin of all religious communion or sacraments, i.e. a renewal of the connection between the god of the Totem tribe with his people at a meal, where “the Totem itself is sacrificed at an annual feast, with special and solemn ritual.”[810]

In the same way, eating of fish by the priests at Askalon may have originated from the idea of bringing the deity and his servants into closer relationship, and may have been continued to impress their religious superiority on the mass of the people, who were forbidden such food, and thus any direct connection with their god. Although the practice was different, the object of both priesthoods—enhancement of their religious prestige—was identical. Where the people abstained, they ate; where the people ate, they abstained.

The Kings as High Priests seem, down to Ptolemaic times, to have eschewed fish absolutely. The Stele of Piankhi, at any rate, indicates their practice c. 700 b.c. To this Nubian conqueror of Egypt came the petty Kings of the Delta to offer submission; but “they, whose legs from fear were as the legs of women, entered not into the King’s house, because they were unclean and eaters of fish, which is an abomination for the Court: but King Namlot, he entered, because he was pure, and ate not fish.”[811]

The reason for this insistence by a Nubian lay perhaps in the fact that Piankhi had as monarch of Egypt just been affiliated to the Sun-god, who not only created righteousness, but lived and fed upon it. A curious prayer or semi-threat by one of the dead survives. If he be not allowed to face his enemy in the great council of the gods, the Sun-god should or would come down from Heaven and live on fish in the Nile, while Hapi, the god of the river, should or would ascend to Heaven and feed on righteousness. The granting of his prayer or the fulfilment of his threat would reverse the whole scheme of creation.[812]

The word translated by abomination signifies generally something dirty. The epithet, if the Deltaic kings resembled the Deltaic fishermen, is not inappropriate. Many representations of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties render the latter, in contradistinction to their brothers of the river proper, with scrubby beards, uncouth of aspect and scant of dress—a characteristic which Diodorus Siculus notes, when describing their habitations as mere cabins of reeds.

But in fairness it must be remembered that since nearly all history and representations reach us from Upper Egypt, these portraits may merely typify the contempt or dislike felt by the richer and more civilised Nilotic for his Deltaic brethren,[813] in whom some writers profess to discern an indigenous and less progressive race.

Were the records and art of Buto, for example, a capital once ranking in importance and opulence with Thebes, available, another story and another picture might confront us. Owing in the main to humidity, our conceptions are perforce coloured by the traditions of Upper Egypt, and thus at times liable to deception.

Is it, for instance, likely that the priests and denizens of the Delta, where maritime commerce principally furnished their prosperity, regarded the sea with the same loathing and dread that the riverine priests and writers express? Can we really imagine the priests of Alexandria not eating salt because it was “Typho’s foam,” or not speaking to pilots because they do business on the great waters, or embellishing their temples with figures (like those at SaÏs) of an infant, an old man, a hawk, a fish, and a sea-horse?

The meaning of these figures, according to Plutarch,[814] “is plainly this: O! ye who are coming into or going out of the world, God hateth impudence, for by the hawk is intended God, by the fish hatred on account of the sea, as has been before observed, and by the sea-horse impudence, the creature being said first to slay his sire, and then force his mother.”

How and when did the abstention from fish arise? Was it originally a tabu observed by all, kings, priests, nobles, and commons?[815] Did the last come gradually to disregard or were they forced by food pressure to rebel against it? Did the nobles in the Old and Middle Kingdoms occasionally wobble in their diet? All these questions meet with no adequate answer.

An answer to the first, i.e. the date and reason of the abstention, as yet baffles even the richness of the fertile preservative sands of Egypt, since adequate data must stretch back to pre-dynastic periods.

One fact stands out. The lower classes very early eschewed the tabu and ensued after fish. Their example was followed later by the upper classes, “with whom fish became a favourite dish: the epicure knew each variety, and in which water the most dainty were to be caught. It was, therefore, a most foolish invention of later Egyptian theology to declare that fish were unclean to the orthodox, and so much to be avoided that a true believer might have no fellowship with those that did.”[816]

Robertson-Smith declares that the doctrine—the highest degree of holiness can only be attained by abstinence—resulted from the political fusion in Egypt of numerous local cults in one national religion, with a national priesthood that represented imperial ideas.[817]

The statement, “countless pictures of offerings to the gods and the dead survive, but never a fish among them” has in the light of subsequent discoveries to be revised. One strong reason at any rate existed in its favour. In the Pyramid texts carved on the sepulchral chambers of the Pharaohs of the VIth Dynasty the hieroglyph of the fish was deliberately suppressed, which goes far to prove that fish were regarded as impure for kings. Furthermore, in the thousands of lines which contain spells for the future benefit of these dead Kings not one figure of a fish occurs.

On the other hand, evidence exists of practices in apparent conflict with the above facts. Newberry,[818] provides two Middle Kingdom instances of fish being brought to the owner of the tomb, and Maspero[819] one of the New Kingdom.

Then, again, how about the famous representations of fish, both upon an altar and also on the face of an altar, in Capart’s work?[820] These basalt statues (he holds) exhibit the King making offerings of fish; others regard them merely as the King marching at the head of the Nile gods, and himself representing the great river, “the giver of all things good.”

Donations of fish were frequently made to the temples by the Kings. Rameses III., for instance (as the Harris Papyrus discloses) presented thousands and thousands, labelled “dressed, cut up, and from the canal.”[821] These gifts were not for the priests, but (probably) for their employÉs or the populace.

We read (in the Hammamat Stele) of “the officers of the Court Fishermen” attendant on Rameses IV. Their task, unlike that of a similar corps in the Chinese court whose duty (inter alia) was to manage the arrangements for the Emperor’s sport, principally consisted in securing “a plenty of fish” for the enormous entourage and servants of the monarch.

But the Pharaohs till Cleopatra were, as far as I can gather, personally as free from the sin of fishery, as the net offered to the Syrian goddess in the epigram of Heliodorus.[822]

The problem as to fish being offered or not to the gods or the dead may possibly be solved, if we bear in mind that while fish are never mentioned in the longer versions of the offering texts of the Old Kingdoms, and are not represented in the pictures of the food provided for the dead before the XIIth Dynasty, after that date some occasional instances to the contrary do occur.

Figures (even of food, as I have shown) drawn in the tombs were supposed to retain their original powers. To avoid their contact with the dead by walking into his chamber, figures of human beings, of animals including snakes, of birds, but not of insects, were, at any rate in the VIth and XIIth Dynasties, frequently mutilated.[823]

A prayer[824] shows how real was the fear: “Let not decay caused by any reptile make an end of me, and let them not come against me in their various forms.” The danger to the royal Ka from a fish swimming, or from the fish Clarias macracanthus walking from its habitat in the Upper Nile into the tomb chapel, beggars description!

The apparent anomaly, that while scenes of fishing occur in the tombs as often as those of fowling and hunting, and that while the latter frequently, the former never, figure in the offerings, is (according to Lacau[825]) quite easy of explanation. When a man dies, he is identified with and taken to Osiris, to whom, like the other gods, no fish was meet for offerings, whereas the scenes, which depicted them, were representations of what a man had done or known in his lifetime.

Additional doubts whether the ban against fish-offerings met with exceptions, are caused by the discovery of models of fish buried in the XIXth Dynasty foundation-deposits along with those of fowl, beef, etc.[826] Perhaps the modelling differentiates the instance. If fish were neither meet nor permissible offerings to the gods, how came it that some deities were venerated in connection with fish?

The evidence of Strabo that the Lates niloticus was at Latopolis,[827] a city named in the fish’s honour, revered in conjunction with a goddess whom he terms Athena, may, like that of many another globe-trotter, perhaps, be discounted.

But when we find in the scattered stones of that temple various sorts of fish, one enclosed in a royal cartouche[828] and at the same place a Ptolemaic-Roman cemetery, containing great numbers of Lates, mummified by art or Nature,[829] and when further we find at Gurob, near the old Moeris Canal, cemeteries of the same fish unassociated with human remains, and dating from the XVIIIth or XIXth Dynasty, when we find all these,[830] we are driven, as was the negro when faced with another, but logical, dilemma, to “purtend brains, at any rate scrat heads.”

Nor is our “purtending or scratting” ended, when attempts, based on the finding in the fish cemetery at Gurob of a small head of a goddess, are made to connect the Athena of Strabo with Hathor, to whom Keller[831] alleges that the Oxyrhynchus (often found embalmed at Thebes) was sacred. So, again, our clarity of ideas is not increased, when we read that Hat-mehyt was the patron goddess of Mendes, the capital of the XVI Nome (which of all the Nomes alone possessed a fish for its emblem) and that this fish is regularly represented above the head of Hat-mehyt.

But one fact stands out as adverse to the identification of any god as a god of fish or connected with fishing. In the magico-religious welter of god-creating and god-adopting characteristic of the later Egyptians, who locally worshipped beasts, birds, reptiles, and insects, the first commandment given to Israel was faithfully observed, in that they made not unto themselves a graven or other image of any deity “of the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth.”[832]

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Apart from the mythological fishes, the Abdu and the Ant, which were supposed to accompany the boat of the Sun, we find others held sacred or worshipped in different Nomes or cities.

Before considering these, I draw attention to the cut of a representation from Gamhud,[833] and to the account by E. Mahler of a Stele, attributed to Thotmes III., now in the Museum at Buda-Pesth.[834]

Both are remarkable; for in both Fish takes the place of the usual Bird-Soul. As the Buda-Pesth Stele is unpublished, we have to depend on Mahler’s account. He tells us that in the ancient beliefs and myths of Egypt the fish was a symbol of eternity, and guided the boat which bore the dead to the waters of the blessed.

The Gamhud illustration, attributed to the Ptolemies, who held fast to the tradition that the parts of Osiris were eaten by three fishes, one of which was the Oxyrhynchus, has a distinct interest, because here for the first time the Oxyrhynchus figures as a substitute for the Bird-Soul.

The Buda-Pesth Stele probably deduces from Gurob, where there is, or rather twenty years ago was, a fish cemetery excavated by Petrie. Here, too, was a temple built by Thotmes III., and a smaller one erected in his honour.

The idea of the dead man may well have been “I have embalmed thousands and thousands of fish. Now then, one of you, in return do your best to secure for me immortality.”

Herodotus[835] states that only two fishes are venerated, the Lepidotus and the Phagrus. The Father of History is not open in this case to the charge of exaggeration, for with these the Oxyrhynchus, and (according to Strabo) the Lates niloticus, and (according to Wilkinson) the Moeotes should be included.

Various reasons are assigned for the veneration, local if not national, of these particular fishes. Wilkinson suggests, with a touch of ironical humour—“the reason of their sanctity (i.e. the Oxyrhynchus and Phagrus) was owing to their being unwholesome: the best way of preventing their being eaten was to assign them a place among the sacred animals of the country!”

Some writers detect in their sanctity a remnant of local Totemism, a word which in blessedness equals and in length of inadequate definition surpasses Mesopotamia.[836]

But Robinson, disagreeing with Robertson Smith and Frazer in their conception of Totemism, denies that these fish were totems in any proper sense. Primitive man performs an act of positive sacrifice when he devotes to the religious tribal idea the best fish of the waters, and thenceforth abstains from eating them; whereas the Egyptians shabbily denied themselves only the refuse. They made that sacred which they could not eat. All the evidence tends to the suspicion that the gods were put off by the priests with the very worst of the fish. If a species were poisonous or belonged to a class that was unwholesome, it was straightway declared sacred.[837]

Speaking from my own experience and purely on palatal grounds, had I been High Priest I should have banned nearly all Nile fishes for their insipidity and muddiness. Tastes, of course, differ. The Lates is passable, but the Oxyrhynchus attracts no opsophagist devotees, which is probably the fault of “The Creator of all things good” in either the temperature of his water or the character of their food, since a cousin, O. mormyrus, geographically not far removed, is ranked by epicures as delicious.[838]

The reason assigned by the priests to Plutarch for the abstention from and local veneration of the Oxyrhynchus, Phagrus, and Lepidotus possesses, whatever its truth, the charm of an antiquity reaching back to the dawn of goddom.

After the slaying of Osiris by Typho, Isis made unwearied search for his body. But she could never recover his private part, for it had been flung into the Nile, and eaten by the Lepidotus, the Phagrus, and the Oxyrhynchus: “fish which of all others, for this reason, the Egyptians have in more especial avoidance. But Isis made its effigies, and so consecrated the phallos, for which the Egyptians to this day observe a festival.”[839]

The same author vouches for the veneration of the Oxyrhynchus, as shown by the people of the city named after that fish; “they will not touch any kind of fish that have been taken with an angle, for they are afraid lest perhaps the hook may be defiled by having at some time or other been employed in catching their favourite fish.”[840] Ælian goes farther: “were but one of these fish taken in a net, the townsmen would let the whole catch free.”[841]

Holy Wars, even if unpreached by a tarbushed Kaiser, came to pass in Plutarch’s day; “within our memory, because the people of Kynopolis presumed to eat their fish, the Oxyrhyncites[842] in revenge seized on all the dogs, or sacred animals of their enemies that came in their way, offering them in sacrifice, and eating their flesh in like manner as they did that of their other victims: this drew on a war between the two cities, wherein both sides, after doing each other much mischief, were at last severely punished by the Romans.”[843]

To another religious war, between the Ombites and the Tentyrites, we owe the great Satire XV. of Juvenal, when banished to Egypt at the age of eighty.[844] The poem ranks high, not only for its mordant irony but also for its description of the origin of civil society, “a description infinitely superior to anything that Lucretius or Horace has delivered on the subject,” according to the not always laudatory Gifford.

“Those” were the Ombites, “These” the Tentyrites, who hated the crocodile worshipped at Ombos: hence

The Phagrus had the distinction of being venerated in Egypt and Greece, whose writers, bothered by none of our scientific hesitation, regarded him not as one of the Mormyri, but as the Eel. They scoffed alike at his deification and his devotees.[846]

The Phagrus, and the Moeotes, which is Wilkinson’s addition to the four other sacred fish, were probably the same under different names. Ælian, indeed, states that the former, worshipped at Syene, was called the Moeotes by the people of Elephantine (quite close to Syene), and attributes its sanctity to its annual appearance always heralding the rise of the Nile,[847] a property of prescience transferred by Plutarch to the Moeotes.[848]

We know so little about the locus of the Lepidotus (Barbus bynni) cult that Wilkinson’s assertion, “its worship extended over most parts of Egypt,” needs confirmatory data.

The Crocodile, like the Lates, was worshipped here and there, but elsewhere keenly hunted. Of the first Thebes and Lake Moeris furnish types. Each place (according to Herodotus) harboured one crocodile in particular, very tame and tractable.[849] They adorned his ears, as Antonina her MurÆna, “with earrings of molten stone or gold, and put bracelets on his forepaws, giving him daily a set portion of bread, with a certain number of victims: when he dies, they embalm and bury him in a sacred place.”[850]

Of the various methods for catching the crocodile our author sets forth one which we all must agree as “worthy of mention.” “They bait a hook with a chine of pork, and let the meat be carried out into the middle of the stream, while the hunter on the bank holds a living pig which he belabours. The crocodile hears its cries and making for the sound encounters the pork, which he instantly swallows down. The men on the shore haul and, when they have got him to land, the first thing the hunter does is to plaster his eyes with mud. This once accomplished, the animal is despatched with ease, otherwise” (it may surprise you) “he gives great trouble.”[851]

Both the Phagrus and the Crocodile possessed foreknowledge as to the rise of the river, the first as to time, the latter as to extent, for “in what place soever the female lays her eggs, that may be concluded to be the utmost extent to which the Nile will spread that year.”[852]

Blackman[853] praises the art of a scene, as (although the crocodile is but roughly blocked out) one ranking with the finest specimens of ancient Egyptian bas-reliefs: “not even the Old Kingdom mastabas at Sakhara can produce anything to surpass it for vigour and beauty of technique.”[854]

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“When a (fisherman) father casts his net, his fate is in the hands of God. In truth there is no calling which is not better than it.”[855]

The classification of Egyptian society made by Herodotus[856] merits mention if only on account of its unexpected gradations; (A) Priests, (B) Warriors, (C) Cowherds, (D) Swineherds, (E) Tradesmen, (F) Interpreters, (G) Boatmen. The position allotted to the cowherd and swineherd before the tradesman, if startling to modern eyes, characterises most early societies. “For trader,” as Seymour shows, “Homer knows no word.”[857] Fishermen, although unnamed but presumably included under boatmen, figure last, a rank consonant with that assigned by the Scribe above.

If their life was socially of the lowest and their toil of the hardest, they must have earned a modest living, even though no tacksman millionaire finds record. We may fairly assume a general and constant demand for fish from (A) the revenues yielded by fisheries, and (B) the taxes paid by fishermen.

Of (A) Lake Moeris affords a striking instance. When the water retired from the lake to the Nile, the daily sale realised one talent of silver (reckoned by Wilkinson at £193 15s. 0d.), and when the current set the other way one-third of that sum, but in all some £45,000 yearly.[858] We learn that the proceeds of these fisheries formed the dowries or allowances for the scents, etc.,[859] of the Queens.

Later on they also received as appanage the revenues of Anthylla famous for its wines, so they fared not badly for pin money. Herodotus[860] informs us that the town “is assigned expressly to the wife of the ruler of Egypt to keep her in shoes. Such has been the custom ever since Egypt fell under Persian rule,” an origin not improbable from Plato’s statement that one district was allotted for toilette purposes to the Persian Queens and called “The Queen’s Girdle.”

(B) The taxes (or revenues) obtained in the Ptolemaic times, ???????, were probably a Government monopoly. They were divided into (a) a tax on fishermen of one quarter of the value of the fish caught (tet??t? ??????), (b) the profits of sale of fish at prices higher than those paid for them direct to the fisherman.

In the Roman period we find t???? ???????? d????, or a rent from marshes deep enough at the time of the inundation to contain fish and shallow enough at other times to grow papyri and marsh plants. Leases for fishing and selling papyri, etc., brought good returns. But these returns must be distinguished from other revenues derived from the industry, e.g. the fisheries of Lake Moeris, and from a tax paid by the fishermen, both of which seem to correspond with the Ptolemaic “fourth part.” On the other hand the f????, no doubt, was a tax paid by fishermen for the right of fishing, or for the use of boats in waters owned by the temples.[861]

The Net, in the marsh country, was not only the most lucrative “engine of encirclement,” but also a double duty paid. In other parts the inhabitants passed their nights upon lofty towers to escape the gnats, but in the marsh land (Herodotus continues), “where are no towers, each man possesses a net instead.[862] By day it serves to catch fish, while at night he spreads it over the bed in which he is to rest and creeping in goes to sleep underneath.” While struck by the resemblance to Goldsmith’s article of furniture,

we are forced once more to “scrat head,” and very hard. Imagination reels before the mesh of a Net, capable alike of catching a marketable fish and denying a gnat!

Fish intended for immediate use were usually dressed on the boat and quickly dispatched to market; the rest of the catch was opened ashore, split, salted, and hung to dry in the sun. Pictures[863] of all these operations, and examples of splitting knives, survive. Splitting in the earlier eras, for some reason, ran, not sheer down the back, but always rather to one side or other.

Promptness of curing in a hot climate like Egypt was all important. Diodorus, indeed, tells us that practically all fish were at once pickled or salted, a statement confirmed by Julius Pollux’s mention of the Egyptian tarichÉ, especially that from Canopus, being exported[864] far and wide, certainly to Palestine, whither “the Egyptian fish came in baskets or barrels.”[865]

Prices of wheat, honey, fish and other wares occur in Spiegelberg’s work,[866] but no attempt is made by him (as far as I know) to correlate the prices in ancient and modern Egypt.

I essay the task more as a jeu d’esprit than for any result of economic value, by means of the Mugil capito. This grey mullet has been identified with the ancient ’Ad, a fish which figures frequently in the representations, e.g. in the Tomb of Ti, of Ptahhetep,[867] and of Naqada.[868] Its habit of ascending the Nile from the sea was known and noted by ancient authorities. Strabo, after stating that it, the Dolphin, and the Shad were the only fish so to do, informs us that the Mullet in his upward journey carefully consorted with the Schalls, or Catfish, whose strong spikes afforded it protection against the crocodiles.[869]

We find at the end of the XXth Dynasty, say 1200 b.c., that 300 of Ireth fish, 100 of Shena’, and 800 ’Ad (each lot) fetched 1 kite of silver—the kite being ¹/₁₀ of a deben of 91 grammes. Although in the XVIIIth Dynasty gold had been just twice as valuable as silver, at this time silver stood to gold in a ratio of 1? to 1.

Thus 100 Shena’, 300 Ireth (both of which are as yet unidentified) and 800 ’Ad fish were (each lot) worth ⁹¹/₁₀×?, i.e. 5·46 grammes of gold.

Now one sovereign weighs 123·27447 grains, and as ¹¹/₁₂ of this is gold it contains 113·0016 grains of gold. As a gramme equals 15·432 grains, the value of 5·46 grammes of gold thus works out at about 14 shillings and 11 pence to the nearest farthing. The whole calculation, however, depends on the assumption that the kite is known to be exactly 9·1 grammes.

This, the latest estimate of its probable weight, can only be an estimate, for the Egyptians of the XVIIIth Dynasty, at any rate, did not make weights to a minute fraction of a gramme. A calculation therefore to the nearest farthing is somewhat meaningless, unless the weight of the kite is determined to be 9·10, and not 9·09 or 9·11 grammes. Since the weight is certainly not known to two places of decimals, it is doubtful if it can be regarded as correct to the first place. Hence 14s. 11d. is not absolutely a more accurate estimate than 15/-.[870]

Assuming for convenience that the kite was worth 15/-, we could have purchased at the end of the XXth Dynasty 800 ’Ad fish for this sum. One fish would thus cost ^{(15 × 12)}/₈₀₀ = ⁹/₄₀ of a penny: but since the Egyptian Mugil capito, as sold in the big markets, averages (I am informed) ½ lb., the conclusion of the whole matter is that in the era mentioned 1 lb., or two fish, cost ⁹/₂₀, or ·45 of a penny. In pre-war days the average marketable price worked out at 2·954 pence per lb., so the Egyptian Mugil in 1913 cost about 6½ times more than c. 1200 b.c., while the English Mugil in 1913, which (according to figures kindly furnished me by the Fishmongers Company) averaged 10 to 12 pence per lb., cost about 24 times more.

The Egyptian correlation of 6½ to 1 cannot, it is true, be definitely established until we have data proving that the kite was exactly 9·1 grammes, nor can it be accurately applied to other commodities, but it may help us to a rough approximation of what some of their prices were in the XXth Dynasty.[871]

The depreciation of money between the XVIIIth and XXth Dynasties, heavy as it seems, was as nothing to that which ensued in subsequent centuries. Examples of this can be observed in the fall of the Gallienus tetradrachm from about half a crown to one halfpenny in less than a century. Again under Macrianus (260 a.d.) the coinage was so bad and so worthless that the banks closed their doors, but were compelled by the king to open and continue “his divine coinage.” At the time of Diocletian’s Edict on maximum prices (301 a.d.) a denarius (4 drachmÆ) was reckoned at ¹/₅₀₀₀₀ of a litra of gold, but in Egypt after Constantine’s reign it fell much lower, e.g. 432,000 denarii equalled 1 pound.

From the Papyrus Oxyrh. 1223 we find the solidus computed at 2,020 × 10,000 = 20,200,000, (!) denarii at the end of the fourth century.[872]

Billon Denarii, i.e. made out of copper and very little silver, ceased to be coined at Alexandria after a.d. 297, and got utterly depreciated.

We get little farther in our quest of correlation of prices even with other passages; in Pap. Fayum Towns (a.d. 100), of 12 drachmÆ for fish; in Pap. Petrie III. 107 (e), 6, 24 drachmÆ for fish (third century b.c.); and in a Papyrus not yet (1918) published, 4 obols and 5 obols for a “male” Cestreus, or Mugil capito.

With salt fish, again, we have no certain leading. For 2 dipla or double jars of this comestible the price was 2 drachmÆ, but then their size is uncertain.[873] So again it doth not vantage us much to read of 240 drachmÆ being given in a.d. 255 for “a jar of pickled fish” (?ept???), because the size of the jar is still undetermined.[874] Nor does “56 drachmÆ for 100 pieces of salt fish” (third century a.d.) solve the problem because, although a “piece of salt fish” probably implied some definite weight, we have no data for discovering to what this amounted.[875] Nor again can we deduce anything definite from the statement that in the third century a.d. a jar (?e?????) of salt fish fetched 1 drachma 1½ obols.

The superior derision with which some writers regard the simple, if inaccurate account, given by Herodotus of the spawning of the Egyptian fish betokens their ignorance of the parable of the beam and the mote.

If Herodotus erred, what (and this I keep reiterating, on the Kipling principle of “lest we forget”) about the theorists for 2300 years as to the procreation of Eels?

Aristotle with his “Entrails of the earth,” Oppian with his “Slime of their bodies,” Helmont with his “May Dew,” others with their “Horse-hair,” and Walton with his “Spontaneous Generation” are they as correct zoologists as the Father of History? With him procreation resulted from a semi-direct if inaccurate connection, but May Dews and Horse-hairs, etc., etc., what do they or what could they do in the galley of contact?

After which outburst I pass to Herodotus.[876]

“Gregarious fish are not found in any numbers in the rivers; they frequent the lagunes, whence, at the season of breeding, they proceed in shoals towards the sea. The males lead the way, and drop their milt as they go, while the females, following close behind, eagerly swallow it down. From this they conceive, and when, after passing some time in the sea, they begin to be in spawn, the whole shoal sets off on its return to its ancient haunts. Now, however, it is no longer the males, but the females, which take the lead: they swim in front in a body, and do exactly as the males did before, dropping little by little their grains of spawn as they go, while the males in their rear devour the grains, each one of which is a fish. A portion of the spawn escapes and is not swallowed by the males, and hence come the fishes which grow afterwards to maturity....

“When the Nile begins to rise, the hollows in the land and the marshy spots near the river are flooded before any other places by the percolation of the water through the river-banks; and these, almost as soon as they become pools, are found to be full of numbers of little fishes. I think that I understand how it is this comes to pass. On the subsidence of the Nile the year before, though the fish retired with the retreating waters, they had first deposited their spawn in the mud upon the banks: and so, when at the usual season the water returns, small fry are rapidly engendered out of the spawn of the preceding year. So much concerning the fish.”

And was the great zoologist Aristotle[877] more accurate in his suggestion as to spawning? “Some surmise that the female becomes impregnated by swallowing the seminal fluid of the male. And there can be no doubt that this proceeding on the part of the female is often witnessed, for at the breeding season the female follows the males and perform the act and strike the males with their mouths under the belly, and the males are thereby induced to part with the sperm sooner and more plentifully.”

The Pahlavi texts tell us that at spawning time or season of excitement fish in pairs travel to and fro a mile in running water. In this coming and going they rub their bodies together, and a kind of sweat drops out between, and both become pregnant.

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This chapter owes its birth to a passage of intrinsic interest but gruesome nature.

Before quoting or dealing with it, I may be allowed a few words as to my running it to ground and the curiosity it excited among Angling scholars.

Some years ago I read in an article that “fishing with the hair of a dead person, ?d?se? ?e??? t???? d??ea?, was practised by the Egyptians, as is shown by discoveries during the last thirty years.” No authority, no reference was given. “Thirty years” opened up a search too extensive to waste on an anonymous statement.

Even so this fishing with an unknown gut, dead men’s hair, kept worrying me. Aristotle and others had written of the use of horse-hair, but none of my friends or I had ever come across this Egyptian tackle. A great authority suggested that it was possibly taken from a body of which the hair continued to grow after death, and thus possessed much value because of length and strength.

Instantly floated before us visions of obtaining by a new Rape of the Lock this most desirable gut. Two nefarious courses were discussed. First, to rifle the coffin of Edward I., which when last opened in Dean Stanley’s time revealed (teste the Verger) long hair still growing. Second, to raid the tomb of the Countess of Abergavenny (nÉe Isabella Despencer) in Tewkesbury Abbey, in which (to use Canon Ernest Smith’s words) “at the restoration of the Abbey in 1875 was disclosed bright auburn hair, apparently as fresh and as plentiful, as when the body was buried four and a half centuries ago.”[878]

Do the Sagas or other ancient Scandinavian literature, in which descriptions of fishing frequently figure, allude to such use of dead men’s hair? Two of the foremost Scandinavian scholars could recall none. The Kalevala—the great Finnish epic—yielded no help.

Nearest comes the account of “Gunnar’s Slaying” in Story of the Burnt Njal.[879] After his bowstring has been cut by his foe, Gunnar said unto his wife, Hallgerda, ‘Give me two locks of thy hair, and ye two, my mother and thou, twist them together into a bowstring for me.’ ‘Does aught lie on it?’ she says. ‘My life lies on it,’ he said; ‘for they will never come to close quarters with me, if I can keep them off with my bow.’ ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Now will I call to thy mind that slap in the face thou gavest me,’ and refused him her hair.

Gunnar, just ere he falls, sings:

The passage containing the Greek words quoted in the article was eventually discovered on p. 82 of Fayum Towns and their Papyri, by Grenfell, Hunt, and Hogarth.

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I subjoin a translation:—

“And so hastening over the rugged ground he came unto the unsightly shores, and there seated on a rock tied the rod with dead hair, and taking bait and feeding with little morsels, drew the hook along (or up and down) in the deep pool. But as naught was caught,” and as a?t? ?? ? ??????? ??de? ?spase?,[882] both in its literal and proverbial sense held true, he returned to the place whence he came, the place of corpses.

The Editors’ introduction to the Papyrus runs: “The matter of the poem is hardly less remarkable than the manner in which it was written down. The subject is the adventures of a man whose name is not given. After some talk, the hero proceeds to a place which is full of corpses being devoured by dogs. He then makes his way to the sea-coast and proceeds to sit down on a rock, and fish with Rod and Line. He did not, however, succeed in catching anything: we then revert to the corpses, the gruesome picture of which is further elaborated. The language and style of the composition, the literary qualities of which are poor enough, clearly show its late date, not posterior to the second century.”

I am indebted to Professor Grenfell for further information. “The Papyrus,” he writes me, “is certainly a poem describing the descent of some one to the under-world.” An Austrian, A. Swoboda,[883] wrote an article to show that it belonged to a Naassene[884] psalm describing the descent of Christ to Hades. The beginning of a poem on this subject, in the same metre as the Papyrus, is known from Hippolytus, Refutatio Hereticorum. The second column of the Papyrus seems to be an address to a Deity, and would fit in with Swoboda’s theory.

“The composition being, in any case of a mystical and imaginative character, I do not think the description of the fishing incident is to be regarded as in any way real, and, from the fisher’s point of view, it is not to be taken literally. No parallel for the use of dead men’s hair in fishing has ever been suggested. In none of the Papyri are there any details about the modes of Angling. ?d?se?, which I should translate tied, has been generally supposed to refer to the angler’s line, and considering the composition is poetical, this seems the natural interpretation.”

This coupled with the Introduction to the Papyrus appears to shatter the statement that fishing with the hair of a dead person was practised in ancient Egypt. But although in such a mystic adventure as a Descent to Hades all is possible and all is pardonable, the passage can hardly from its extremely abrupt and casual mention of hair be regarded as heralding in the use of this substance as a quite new adjunct to fishing. It partakes of the nature of a simile.

If it be true that an ancient simile was intended to throw light from the more familiar on the less familiar, but never to illustrate the moderately familiar by the wholly strange, one might, despite the absence of all reference to such tackle in the representations or in classical writers, possibly argue that lines made of the hair of the dead were known and were used by the Egyptians. The substitution of the hair of a dead person for the hair of a horse may be but a bold and not ineffective attempt to heighten the mysticism of the picture.

Apart from the pleasant gain which the quest and the running down of this hare in “a mare’s nest” (to mix metaphors boldly) entailed, one’s only real satisfaction is that the Egyptian angler, notwithstanding his gruesome gut and loathsome bait, caught Nothing!

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In accordance with my custom of ending the Fishing of each nation by a story in which fish play directly or indirectly an important part, I searched for an Egyptian tale or legend. The serpent Apep in the Ra myth is merely a variant of similar beasts figuring in the Bel and Andromeda legends: his story, moreover, lacks the stir of battle of the former, or the human interest of the latter.[885] The absence of any such legend is due doubtless to the bad esteem in which fish were held by the priests, who in the early days, at any rate, wrote the history of the country.

As Maspero in his Contes Populaires de l’ancienne Égypte (which by the by differs in The Two Brothers from the account given by Plutarch) failed to provide provender, I perforce fall back on a story, which, if Ægean in locale, is Egyptian in effect, the tale of the ring of Polycrates.

This has been used by Cicero and other ancient writers to point the moral of calling no man happy until his death, and by modern to adorn many a tale of good luck, but since its historical importance has often been neglected, I venture to recall shortly what Herodotus sets forth.[886]

Polycrates, Tyrant of Samos, was so proverbial for a good fortune, which had never met with check or disaster, that Amasis, King of Egypt, fearing the effects of the f????? of the Gods on Polycrates and consequently on their newly-formed alliance, advised him to propitiate them by getting rid of one of his most valued possessions. Accordingly the Tyrant cast into the sea[887] his seal-ring of extraordinary beauty, which in a few days was found in the belly of a fish and restored to him.

This last shock of happy fortune was too much for Amasis, who broke off his alliance and thus left Polycrates free to aid Cambyses in his invasion and conquest of Egypt. It is fair to add, even at the expense of this pretty fish story, that Grote (IV. 323) holds that Polycrates himself broke off the Egyptian to effect the more powerful Persian alliance.

Note.—For kind advice at “parlous times” I am indebted to my friends, Dr. Alan H. Gardiner and Miss M. A. Murray. The latter has doubled the debt by reading my proofs.

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ASSYRIAN FISHING