EGYPTIAN FISHING
MEN CARRYING A LARGE FISH.
From Petrie’s Medum, Pl. XII.
[See n. 1, p. 301].
NOTE
Conflicting chronologies prevent the definite dating of the earlier Egyptian monarchs: verily a thousand years are but as yesterday in the sight of Manetho, Mariette et cie. Thus it is that the reign of Menes, the first historical king, has no permanent abiding place in the 3167 years between 5867 and 2700 b.c. Discrepancy in dates is not confined to the older or later computators, such as Champollion-Figeac, Wilkinson, Lepsius, and Petrie, but has infected quite recent writers, like Borchardt and Albright, who in 1917 and in 1919 respectively place Menes c. 4500, and c. 2900 b.c.
If the authorities disagree as to the dates of the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms (the divisions used in my pages), they agree fairly well on what Dynasties are comprised in each of these. So whether a reader adhere to 5867 or to 2700 b.c. for Menes, the Old Kingdom still comprises Dynasties I. to XI.; the Middle Kingdom Dynasties XII. to XVI.; the New Kingdom Dynasty XVII. to Alexander the Great or 332 b.c., at which stage the Ptolemies came on the scene.
EGYPTIAN FISHING[747]
CHAPTER XXIII
“THE NILE IS EGYPT”
This terse epigram seems foreshadowed by Homer, who calls the river (ὁ) Αἴγυπτος, and the country (ή) Αἴγυπτος, 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.
CHAPTER XXIV
TACKLE
“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]
EARLY HARPOON.
[See note 1].
[See note 2].
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.
AN EGYPTIAN REEL.
From F. Ll. Griffith, Beni Hasan, Pt. 4, Pl. 13, 3.
SPEARING FISH.
From F. Ll. Griffith, Beni Hasan, Pt. 4, Pl. 13, 3.
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.
SENBI SPEARING FISH.
From A. M. Blackman, Rock Tombs of Meir, Vol. I. Pl. 11.
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 Kenamūn 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 EARLIEST REPRESENTATION OF ANGLING, c. 2000 B.C.
From P. E. Newberry, Beni Hasan, Pt. 1, Pl. 29.
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 ⅛ 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”!
A FISHING SCENE.
From N. de G. Davies, The Rock Tombs of Deir el Gebrawi, Pt. 2, Pl. 5.
CHAPTER XXV
ABSTENTION FROM FISH
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]
CHAPTER XXVI
SACRED FISH
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 Mœotes should be included.
THE OXYRHYNCHUS
TAKING THE PART OF THE USUAL BIRD-SOUL.
From Ahmed Bey Kamal, Annales du Service des Antiquités de l’Égypte.
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.
“Who knows not to what monstrous gods, my friend, The mad inhabitants of Egypt bend? The snake-devouring ibis, These enshrine, Those think the crocodile alone divine.”
“Those” were the Ombites, “These” the Tentyrites, who hated the crocodile worshipped at Ombos: hence
“Blind bigotry, at first, the evil wrought, For each despised the other’s gods, and thought Its own the true, the genuine—in a word The only deities to be adored.”[845]
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 Mœotes, 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 Mœotes 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 Mœotes.[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 Mœris 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]
CHAPTER XXVII
FISHERIES—ATTEMPTED CORRELATION OF THE PRICE OF
FISH THEN AND NOW—SPAWNING
“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 Mœris 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, ἰχθυηρά, were probably a Government monopoly. They were divided into (a) a tax on fishermen of one quarter of the value of the fish caught (τετάρτη ἁλιέων), (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 τέλος ἰχθυηρᾶς δρυμῶν, 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 Mœris, and from a tax paid by the fishermen, both of which seem to correspond with the Ptolemaic “fourth part.” On the other hand the φόρος, 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,
“A bed by night, a chest of drawers by day,”
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 1⅔ to 1.
Thus 100 Shena’, 300 Ireth (both of which are as yet unidentified) and 800 ’Ad fish were (each lot) worth 91⁄10 × ⅗, 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” (λεπτίον), 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 (κεράμιου) 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.
CHAPTER XXVIII
FISHING WITH THE HAIR OF THE DEAD
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, ἔδησεν νεκρᾷ τριχὶ δέλεαρ, 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:
“Now my helpmeet, wimple hooded, Hurries all my fame to earth. Woman, fond of Frodi’s flour Wends her hand, as she is wont.”[880]
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.
καὶ δὴ χθόνα δυσπράπελον φθάσας ασχήμονας ἦλθε παρ’ ἠόνας ἒνθεν δὲ πέτραν καθίσας ὅτε κάλαμον μὲν ἔδησεν νεκρᾷ τριχὶ δέλεαρ δὲ λαβὼν καὶ ψωμίσας ἂγκιστρον ἀγῆγε βύθει βυθῷ
ὡς δ’ οὐδὲν ὅλως τότ’ ἐλαμμένον[881]
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 αὕτη μὲν ἡ μηρινθός οὔδεν ἔσπασεν,[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. Ἔδησεν, 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!
CHAPTER XXIX
THE RING OF POLYCRATES
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 φθόνος 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.
ASSYRIAN FISHING
FISHERMAN WADING WITH CREEL ROUND NECK.
From Layard’s Monuments of Nineveh, 1st series, Pl. 673.
ASSYRIAN FISHING[888]
CHAPTER XXX
NO ROD, ALTHOUGH CLOSE INTERCOURSE WITH EGYPT
There is no delineation or suggestion of the Rod, or of Angling on any sculpture or any seal, Sumerian, Babylonian, or Assyrian.[889]
The omission does not preclude the existence or use of the Rod. If it did exist, and were used, we are surprised that there should not survive amongst the thousands of things mentioned and the many pursuits represented a single indication of it. Our wonder, indeed, grows stronger when we call to mind that the Assyrians:
(a) Were a people much given to sport of all kinds:
(b) Were keenly addicted to the eating of fish, which was not, as in Israel or Egypt, half-banned by a prophet, or whole-barred to a priesthood by custom, totemistic or other:
(c) Did attach very real importance to the maintenance of an ample supply of fish. Their dams and vivaria, the adjuncts of every important temple or every self-respecting township, and their enforcement of Fish Regulations, attest the economic value:
(d) Do mention and do represent other kinds of fishing, e.g. with the hand-line and the net. The latter, for both fowling and fishing, often finds place in their, and Israelitish, metaphors. Examples occur in the story of the defeat of Marduk and Tiāmat, “They (the enemies) were cast into the net,” and in the prayer of Eannatum to the god Enki that, if the citizens of Umma in future break the recent treaty, he will destroy them in his net. But in the legend of the taking of Zu, the stealer of the destiny-tablets, the net of the Sun-god is certainly a fowling one:
(e) Did possess near at hand, and had not to import (as the Romans from Africa) ample material for the Rod in reeds, which were abundant near Babylon and were utilised in the construction of furniture, light boats, and fences. In the lists of private property these reeds—employed for household not angling purposes—figure not infrequently:
(f) Were for hundreds of years closely associated in intercourse and trade with the Egyptians, whose use of the Rod can be carried back to about the XIIth Dynasty, c. 2000, or, according to Petrie’s chronology, c. 3500 b.c.
Before discussing the date of the first contact or connection between the two countries, it is advisable shortly to distinguish between the three peoples whom I group under the term Assyrians, and roughly apportion the periods of the four thousand odd years of Assyrian history during which each was predominant.
The first, the Sumerians, occupied before—perhaps long before—the close of the fourth millennium the land on the lower plain of the Tigris and Euphrates and on the sea coast, as it then was.[890] They possessed an advanced civilisation, with an organised government, many large cities, and considerable agricultural and industrial development.
Whence their emigration, to what family, Mongol or other, they belong, is not clear. It is settled they were not Semites, like the Babylonians and Assyrians. Their language (preserved in liturgies, etc.,[891] down even to the time of the Persian conquest) and their writing, adopted by the Babylonians and Assyrians, which runs, unlike the Hebrew, from left to right,[892] disprove Sumerian descent from Shem.
It is impossible at present to fix a definite period for their immigration. The dates assigned vary from 7000 to 4000 b.c. The statement, however, that “Aryans, Turanians, Semites were all in a nomadic condition, when the early Sumerian settlers in Lower Babylonia betook themselves to agriculture, builded great cities, and established a stable government,” seems hardly exaggerated, even though it postulates a very ancient era.
The second, the Semitic Babylonians, starting possibly from South Arabia by way of the Syrian coast, reached the lower part of the Tigris and Euphrates about 3800 b.c.[893] It was not, however, until some thousand years afterwards, that they effected a conquest of the Sumerians.
Like other defeated peoples, such as the Canaanites with the Jews, the Irish with the English, “Hibernis ipsis Hiberniores,” they grafted their policy on that of their victors, and perpetuated many of their racial characteristics and customs, as well as their religion. “The Semitic invaders seem to have been completely converted. In fact Babylonian religion has scarcely anything characteristically Semitic in it.”[894]
The third, the Assyrians proper, an offshoot from Babylonia, are found (before 2300 b.c.) pushing their way north along the Tigris, on whose western bank they founded their first city and earliest capital—Asur. Wars between them and Babylonia mark the history of centuries. Their definite suzerainty over that country was only established by Tiglath-Pileser III., c. 730 b.c.
Passing now to the dates of the connection between this Empire and Egypt, the first assigned is:
(a) Early dynastic, say about 4400 b.c., which would probably correspond to the early Sumerian periods. Some authorities indeed hold that Egypt was invaded by Babylonians, or was culturally permeated by the “proto-Babylonians,” or Sumerians. Of invasion we possess no proof, or even strong suggestion; of cultural permeation, to which Hommel, in especial, attributes the whole primeval culture of Egypt, some elements and some signs are possibly noticeable, but even these are Semitic, not Sumerian,[895] while their total compares insignificantly with those of native origin.[896]
Of these signs, the use by the Egyptians of the cylinder seal, of which the Royal tombs of the first Dynasty afford examples, stands out as the most important. As this characterised Sumer and Babylonia at all times, while it fell into disuse in the country of the Pharaohs, the seal was inferred to be an original product of Sumer, whence it reached Egypt in late pre-dynastic or early dynastic times.
But (as King[897] continues) “Recent research—such as Naville’s at Abydos, and Reisner’s at Naga-ed-Dêr—leaves small room for the theory that early Egyptian culture was subjected to any strong foreign influence in early dynastic times; thus the theory of the invasion by Semitic tribes must be given up.” Maspero maintains that as far back as the IVth or Vth Dynasties there were overland relations between Egypt and Chaldea.[898]
(b) Petrie[899] places the beginning of the invasion of Egypt by the Semites about 3400 b.c. When referring to a painting of one of these Princes of the Desert named Absha coming into Egypt, he writes that “though 1000 years before Abram” (whom he himself dates about 2100 b.c.) “he was one of the same race: it is therefore invaluable as an historical type of the great Semitic invasion.” Evidence from Egyptian sources seems to show that before and after the conquest by the Hyksos, Semitic invasions occurred after the VIth Dynasty and again c. 2250 b.c.
Petrie, on the strength of the cylinder of Khendy and the tablet of Khenzerm—two Babylonians “who rose to the throne of Egypt”—concludes that an invasion from Syro-Mesopotamia took place in the XIVth Dynasty, say 2800 b.c.
(c) It is not, however, till the XVIIIth Dynasty, c. 1400 b.c., that we reach firm ground for fixing the first point of direct historical contact between Babylonia and Egypt.
Authority for this dating is found in the famous tablets brought to light in 1887 at Tel-el-Amarna, which include letters from the rulers of Babylonia and Assyria to Amenhotep III. and his son Akhenaton. Apart from the historical value of their presumptive indication of an earlier intercourse, the discovery discloses three points of great interest.
First, the fact that these were written in Babylonian shows that this language had already become the lingua franca of the civilised world. Second, a more human personal note, the probability from the red dots (still visible) made by some Egyptian with a reed for the purpose of marking the divisions of the foreign words, that the acquisition of this lingua franca was advisable, perhaps necessary, to qualification for a clerkship or an embassy. Third, that Babylonian literature had found its way among the nations which used its language.
Of this we have conclusive evidence in two documents. The first concerns the goddess Ereshkigal, the other transmits the legend of Adapa.[900]
From the Bekten stele we deduce a close intercourse between the two countries about the XIXth Dynasty, for we read of Rameses II.[901] being in Mesopotamia “according to his wont, year by year,” and receiving tributes and presents from the chiefs of the countries round about.
The connection between Assyria (proper) and Egypt rests on ample evidence. Fish, or “beasts of the sea,” passed as presents, perhaps as trade. On the Broken Column of Tiglath-Pileser I. (Cylinder IV. 29-30) we read, “And a great beast of the River, a great beast of the Sea, the king of Musrê” (probably Egypt) “sent (unto him).”
The Select Papyri (pl. 75, 1, 7) tell of certain fish being brought, perhaps as a staple of trade, from the Puharuta or Euphrates to Egypt, and (in pl. 96, 1, 7) of another fish or fishy substance called Rura, being imported from the land of the great waters, Mesopotamia.[902]
MEN FISHING ASTRIDE GOATSKINS.[903]
From Assyrian Sculptures in Brit. Mus., No. 430.
CHAPTER XXXI
FISHING METHODS
The relevance to fish and fishing of all the preceding matter, except the last two sentences, may be challenged: a moment’s consideration, however, shows that it is apposite.
The object of introducing these historical facts is to demonstrate (1) the existence of an intercourse between Assyria and Egypt for certainly fourteen hundred, possibly three thousand, years, (2) to show cause for our astonishment at the absence of the Rod from all Mesopotamian representation or records, and at the non-adoption of a weapon which for centuries found favour with the Egyptians.
In my Jewish chapter I comment at length on the absence of any mention of or allusion to the Rod in Israelitish literature and on the unconvincing reasons advanced for this absence. Angling may have been unsuited to the Semitic temperament, because it yielded less lucrative returns than the Net.
Even if we grant that the ruling or only passion of this temperament was for fishing “in plenty,” why, we are driven to ask, did both nations condescend to fishing with hand-lines, which are not much more productive than the Rod? If hand-lining was prompted by some instinct of sport, why was Angling, the higher development of this instinct, not also reached?
Of the four implements of Fishing, the Spear, the Rod, the Line and Hook, and the Net, the Assyrians seem to have been acquainted only with the last two, Line and Hook, and Net.
Examples of the former method occur in Monuments of Nineveh (1st Series). In Plate 39B, a man sitting on a terrace by a river is depicted in the act of landing a fish; in Plate 67B, a man is wading in a river with what seems to be identical with a creel. The first was excavated, and subsequently re-buried at Nimroud, the latter (also re-buried) at Kouyunjik. The second picture excites a livelier interest, for two men well into their fish are shown in the water astride the inflated skins of a goat—a method of crossing the Tigris as habitual then as in the present year of our century.[904]
Despite Rawlinson’s sentence, “of early Chaldean (i.e. Sumerian) there are found made of bronze materials chains, nails, and fish-hooks,”[905] no specimen of a fish-hook, bronze or other, has been as yet obtained in Mesopotamia. It is impossible thus to determine whether the hooks were straight like those recorded by Plutarch, bent like those of the Odyssey, or barbed. Cros, however, claims that Lagash excavations yielded “copper fish hooks.” Rev. d’Assyr., vi. 48.
Representations also fail to help, probably because a hook, plain and simple, hardly commends itself as a subject for artistic treatment. Nor does the primitive Assyrian sculptor, however distrustful of the imagination of the observer, go as far as to depict “by conventional device” a hook inside the mouth of the fish which is being taken!
In the Assyrian language there is apparently no word for fish-hook. From the resemblance between the Hebrew word ḥōaḥ, which means both thorn and fish-hook, and the Assyrian word ḥâḥu, which, it is alleged, means thorn, it has been conjectured that in the latter word we have the Assyrian term for fish-hook. Professor S. Langdon, who in a letter to me advances this conjecture, goes even farther—“in fact ḥâḥu is our only direct evidence for the practice of fishing with hook and line in Assyria.”
Basing himself on a similar Hebraic resemblance, he would make the Assyrian ṣinnitān, “two reins,” come from a supposed ṣinnitu, a possible feminine of ṣinnu, which occurs perhaps in the sense of “thorn,” and carry the same meaning as the Hebrew ṣên, which probably equals “thorn,” while its plural ṣinnōth does stand for “fish-hooks.”
He believes that in the word, abarshu, which Esarhaddon employs, “I snatched him (Abdi-Milkuti, King of Sidon) as a fish from the sea,” and again, of a chief of the Lebanon range who had rebelled and fled, “I caught him from the mountains like a bird,” we have evidence of a technical word for pulling or jerking out a fish with a line held in the hand, or perhaps attached to a Rod, because “snatch” would hardly be the appropriate term for the slower action involved in the drawing in of a net.[906]
Whether in the first simile the suggestion is philologically valid is a point for Assyrian scholars to determine. The adequate rendering or explaining of Sumerian words by Assyrian ones is often difficult and doubtful, for while the latter language is a great help to understanding the former, the Assyrian, especially the later Assyrian, equivalent does not entirely correspond to what would be expected from a literal analysis of the Sumerian word. The second simile, I hold, alludes to the Net of the fowler, with which the representations show the Assyrians to have been familiar.
While there may be doubt whether we possess any Assyrian word signifying hooks, there can be none as to their existence and their employment.
From the absence of any, even conjectural, word for or representation of a float, we can only infer that ground bait fishing was the chief, perhaps the sole, line method in vogue.
I can find no evidence that the Assyrians availed themselves of the spear, the trident, drugs or poison, but as the first two figure in Egyptian, Jewish, and Roman records, and appear to be the common property of all early peoples, the probability is that they were known and used in the Two Rivers.
The fish of these resembled the fish of the Nile in their alleged refusal to rise to a fly, but our soldiers have caught on the fly hundreds of “salmon” of good weight up to 112 lbs. One (hand-lined) scaled 170 lbs., and one (speared) ran up to 215 lbs. This “salmon” is a kind of mahseer, the noblest of the carp family,[907] or, according to Mr. Tate Regan, a barbel, probably the species Barbus esocinus described by Heckel as coming from the Tigris.[908]
The second method was by Netting, which to judge from its repeated occurrence either as a pursuit or in metaphor was universal, and prevailed far more extensively than line fishing, especially in Sumeria. The only Sumerian word, according to Dr. Langdon, for fishing, ha-dib (one of the oldest words in the world for the act or occupation), signifies or is akin to a word signifying “to surround,” i.e. with a net, as does the Babylonian term bâru. If this be the case, Netting probably constituted their universal, possibly their only fishing.
In the eastern division of Assyria proper lie the main tributaries of the Tigris, such as the Zāb and the Diyālā, rising among the Kurdish mountains. As Netting was naturally more restricted in this area than in the Persian Gulf, line fishing possibly obtained more widely here than in the South.
THE NET OF NINGIRSU (SO-CALLED).
From L. Heuzey, Restitution matérielle de la stèle des Vautours, Pl. 1, Fragment E.
At any rate it is from the Sumerian excavations that we derive a well-known example of metaphorical Net fishing. This is to be found in what till lately has been held to be a fine representation[909] of Ningirsu, the god of the Sumerian Telloh or Babylonian Lagash, triumphing over his enemies.
The Net full of prisoners symbolises the capture of the enemies of the city. To indicate the impossibility of escape (Jastrow continues), “a prisoner who has thrust his head out of one of the meshes is being beaten back by a weapon in the hands of the god.”[910] King further elaborates the scene; “The god grasps in his right hand a heavy mace which he lets fall upon the Net in front of him containing captives, whose bodies may be seen writhing and struggling like fish in the broad meshes. On the relief, the cords of the Net are symmetrically arranged: the rounded corners at the top show it as a Net formed of ropes and cordage.”[911] But later Sumerian scholars deny that Ningirsu has anything to do with the Net or even figures in the scene. On the Stèle des Vautours the person represented is not a god, but a king, Eannatum, with captured soldiers enclosed in the Net (Shusgal). What is more, the king in the accompanying inscription, not only designates the Net as that of Enlil, the earth god, but also of Ninharsag, the mother goddess, of Enki, the water god, of Siu, the moon god, and of Shamash, the sun god. All the greater gods were supposed to carry nets: Ningirsu must certainly have possessed one, but neither he or it are depicted here.
CHAPTER XXXII
THE EARLIEST RECORDED CONTRACT OF FISHING
One of the very earliest—the earliest as far as I have found—recorded contract concerning fishing occurs in the second year of Darius II., 422 b.c. It runs thus[912]:—
“Ribat son of Bel-Eriba the slave of Enlil-nadin-shumi spoke of his own free will to Enlil-nadin-shumi son of Murashu in the following manner: ‘The fishpond between the village Ahshanu and the farm of Bel-abu-uzur in the field of the master of the merchants and the fishpond in the field of the Prefect and the fishpond by the village of Bit-Natun-El, give me for yearly payment. Each year I will give one half talent of pure silver, and from the day on which the fishponds are given to me for fishing, daily will I supply fish for thy table.’ And then Enlil-nadin-shumi heard him, and he gave him fishponds for a yearly tribute of half a talent of silver.
Signed in the presence of two judges, before six witnesses, and a scribe.”
The Tablet is impressed with five seals.[913]
The next recorded fishing contract deals with netting in Babylonian waters. It is dated the 25th day of Elul in the fifth year of Darius II., or 419 b.c. B. Meissner’s translation of the document may be rendered as follows[914]:—
“Makimni-anni the son of Bel-ab-usur, Bi’-iliya the son of ... & Ishiya, Natin the son of Tabshalam, and Zadabyama the son of Khinni-Bel, of their own free will spoke as follows to Ribat, the son of Bel-eriba, the servant of Rimut-Ninurta: ‘Give five nets and we will deliver to you five hundred fish of good quality (tuḳḳunu) by the 15th day of the month Tishri in the 5th year!’ Then Ribat hearkened unto them and gave them five nets.[915] On the 15th of Tisri they shall deliver the five hundred fish of good quality. If they do not deliver the five hundred fish of good quality on the appointed day for their delivery, then on the 20th day of Tishri shall they deliver a thousand fish. Each one goes bail for the other in respect of making up the number of the fish. For the five hundred fish, Bel-ibni, the son of Apla, also goes bail.”
The parties to the contract are Ribat, the steward of the rich Babylonian banker Rimut-Ninurta, and five Aramaic fishermen. In consideration of Ribat’s furnishing five nets, they bind themselves to deliver by the 15th of Tishri (about September), i.e. within twenty days from the making of the contract, five hundred fish. On failure to do so, the time is extended by five days, but the number of the fish is then increased to one thousand. Each of the five fishermen “goes bail” for delivery of five hundred, or if need be, of a thousand fish, but an outsider, Bel-ibni, son of Apla, cautiously limits his bail or guarantee to the first figure.
These documents possess many points of interest.
(A) They are not only the very earliest, but I suggest the only extant fishing contracts (proper) prior to the third century a.d. In Egypt, during the Ptolemaic period, fishermen, it is true, had to pay to the Government a quarter of the value of their catch (τεττάρτη ἁλιέων), but this seems to have been a regular tax. Later on we find fishermen paying to the priests of Lake Moeris a φόρος (not to be confounded with ἰχθυηρὰ δρυμῶν, or state tax) which presumably included the purchase of the right to fish, as well as the hire of boats. But this was in the nature of a royalty or rent, was a continuous obligation, and proportioned to the catch, whereas in our second document the time is limited, and the payment fixed, not proportioned.[916]
(B) The second contract demonstrates that the custom of additional guarantors is no mere modern institution.
(C) It also tends to show that the system, previously known as employed by Babylonian landlords, of letting their farms to tenants for a fixed proportion of the crops, extended occasionally to their waters as well.
CHAPTER XXXIII
FISH-GODS—DAGON
I find no trace in Assyria of Ichthyolatry, or of certain fish being accounted sacred, or forbidden as food. The nearest approach to abstention occurs in the warning that on the 9th day of Iyyar to partake of fish was almost certain to bring on an attack of sickness, just as in Syria ichthyophagy was held to entail ulcers and wasting diseases.[917]
Despite the Dagon or Oannes traditions, I am not convinced that in the crowded pantheon of Babylon or Assyria there can be found a fish-god proper, or god of fishing, i.e. a deity similar to those of Greece and Rome with a temple and established priesthood, to whom fishermen made prayer and offerings either for boons received or favours to come.
If the word, fish-god, is limited strictly to those images, half-man, half-fish, which are to be found on seal Cylinders,[918] or sculptured or depicted in the outer halls or walls of some deity’s temple, there is certainly—even if the images at Nineveh were importations from the Mediterranean coast and not indigenous—considerable proof of their existence. But if the word connotes the attributes of a special temple, a priesthood, and sacrifices, such as we find in connection with the Philistinian Dagon at Ashdod, I suggest there is no proof whatever. The fact seems to be that in early Sumeria the fish-god or man-fish was a symbol of Ea, the god of water, and probably derived from Aquarius.[919]
The Assyrian colonists carried north with them the pantheon of the Babylonians, composed in part of the local deities of Sumeria, and in part of their own translated from their original habitat; but from the start they modified the hierarchy and changed materially the individual attributes of the gods.[920]
Thus we find that mighty Assyrian hunter, Tiglath-Pileser I., in his record of the beasts he had taken, e.g. four elephants caught alive, or had slain in the desert, which included “four wild oxen mighty and terrible, ten elephants, one hundred and twenty lions on foot, and eight hundred speared from his chariot,” ascribing his success to the help of the gods Ninurta and Nergal.
These gods were closely associated with battle and sport, but to both other characteristics were attributed at various epochs of their godhood. It has been suggested that the evolution of the fish-god Dagon from the Babylonian deity Dagān followed on such lines, but sufficient data for an identification of the two do not survive.
From the sculptures discovered at Kouyunjik and at Nimroud (now in the British Museum), and from an Assyrian cylinder,[921] Layard is able, although all three vary somewhat in details, to describe this so-called fish-god, be it Oannes or Dagon,[922] as “combining the human shape with that of the fish. The head of the fish formed a mitre above that of the man, whilst its scaly limbs, back, and fan-like tail fell as a cloak behind, leaving the human limbs and feet exposed.” But in identifying this mythic form with Oannes, he terms it merely “the sacred man-fish,”not deity.[923]
There were to be seen in the temple of Belus, according to Berosus, sculptured representations of men with two wings, or two faces, with the legs and horns of goats,[924] or the hoofs of horses; also bulls with the heads of men, and horses with the heads of dogs.[925]
FISH-GOD.
From Layard’s
Nineveh and Babylon.
I venture to suggest that the mystic fish-form of Dagon or Oannes is of the same nature and in the same category as the man with the legs and horns of goats, or with the hoofs of horses: but these mythic goat or horse forms were not elevated into goat-gods or horse-gods. The idea of the deification of the fish-forms, whether that of a man issuing from a fish or of a man whose upper half was human but lower piscine, may, perhaps, have sprung from the undoubted worship by the Philistines at Ashdod and elsewhere of the god called Dagon, and partly to the original description of him in the A.V., but now corrected in the R.V.
Dagon, it will be remembered (I Samuel v. 4), after being confronted with the ark of the Lord in the morning, was found fallen: “the head of Dagon and both the palms of his hands lay cut upon the threshold, only the fishy part (A.V.) or stump (R.V.) of Dagon was left unto him.” From this passage Milton undoubtedly drew his conception of—
“Dagon his name; sea-monster, upward man And downward fish.”[926]
It is possible that the theory of his having from his navel down the form of a fish, and from his navel up the form of a man—a theory which is unknown to the Targum, Josephus, or the Talmud, and perhaps is as late as the twelfth century a.d.[927] —merely transfers by the help of etymology the description given by Lucian of the goddess Derceto, worshipped on the same coast-line by the Syrians, who were more partial to fish deities than the Assyrians.[928]
This Dagon has been mistakenly connected with Odacon, the last of the five sea-monsters who arose from the Erythræan Sea. His body (according to Berosus) was like that of a fish, but under the head of the fish was that of a man, to whose tail were added women’s feet, whose voice was human, and whose language was articulate. During the day he instructed the Sumerians in letters and in all arts and sciences, more especially in the building of temples, but at night he plunged again into the sea.[929]
GILGAMESH
CARRYING FISH.
From
La Revue d’Assyriologie,
VI. 57.
Authorities disagree whether Dagon derives his name from the Hebrew Dāg, signifying fish, or dāgān, sheaf or agriculture. Sanchouniathon early held, as do most modern writers, the latter view. Reichardt errs in his conjecture that the representation in De Sarzec (p. 189) shows the deity holding in his hand ears of corn, instead of what really is a palm branch of the conventional type.[930]
Cylinder seals depict[931] river gods, some with streams rising from their shoulders, or flowing from their laps, or from vases in their laps, and containing fish, and others half men and half fish. Mythological beings with fish head-dress occur not only on seals but on the Ninevite reliefs, etc., where it has been suggested that they do represent Dagan.
The delineation of fish on vases, etc.,[932] and of a fish in a stream of water on a small fragment from Telloh, are of early Sumerian art. The representation of Gilgamesh carrying fish dates from at least 2800 b.c., or some thirteen hundred years previous to the Phylokapi Vase (the most ancient Greek representation of men similarly engaged) and so furnishes a comparison, and from the differences in delineation of face, arms, and eyes a contrast of singular interest.[933]
CHAPTER XXXIV
THE LEGENDS OF ADAPA, AND OF THE FLOOD
Ea (originally the primal deity of the Sumerian city of Eridu and eventually the god of the waters on and beneath the Earth) formed with Anu, the god of Heaven, and Enlil, the god of the Earth, from the earliest period the great triad at the head of the Babylonian pantheon. The representation of Ea took the form of a sea-monster with a body of a big fish, full of stars, and claws for the base of his feet.[934]
Ea is ordinarily known from the pretty legend woven round his mortal son Adapa, and the command in obedience to which Adapa firmly but unconsciously made refusal of the gift of immortality.
The latter, to supply his father’s household, went a-fishing in the sea one day—fish food was evidently not the “abomination” to the Sumerian that it was to the Egyptian gods—but suddenly Shūtu the South Wind came on to blow, upset his sailing boat, and ducked him under the water, or, as Adapa puts it, “made me descend to the house of my lord,” i.e. Ea, god of the Sea.[935] In anger Adapa caught the South Wind and broke her wings.[936] But for this assault he was haled to appear in heaven before Anu, who had noticed, or had learnt through his messenger,[937] that the South Wind had ceased, according to the earlier or Eridean account, to blow for seven days.
Before setting out Adapa was bidden by Ea to put on garments of mourning to propitiate the two gods, Tammuz and Gishzida, guarding the portals of heaven, but was warned not to touch at any hazard what he purposely misnamed the “Bread of Death,” or the “Water of Death,” which would be offered unto him.[938] He could, however, accept the garment and the oil when likewise presented.
At the interview the guardian gods interceded so successfully with Anu that his wrath waned; he granted a pardon, and decided that as Adapa had seen the interior of heaven, he should be added to the company of the gods.
THE DEMON OF THE
SOUTH-WEST WIND.
From Karl Frank,
Babylonische
Beschwörtunge Reliefs,
p. 80.
He therefore commanded that the “Bread of Life” and the “Water of Life” should be brought forth; but Adapa would neither eat nor drink of them, although he put on the proffered garment and anointed himself with the poured-out oil. And Anu, when he saw that Adapa had not partaken of the “Bread of Life,” or of the “Water of Life,” asked him, saying, “Come, Adapa, why dost thou neither eat nor drink?” And Adapa answered that he had refused to eat or drink, because Ea his lord had so commanded him.
Whereon comes the conclusion of the whole matter, and the loss of immortality in the last words of Anu, “And now thou canst not live!”[939]
Ea was regarded not only as the god of the sea, but of wisdom, somewhat perhaps on the lines of myths common to Greece, India, and elsewhere, which tell us that always by the way of the sea came civilisation. The great civilisations of the world have in fact been developed round the shores of the great seas—the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic.
The Assyrian legends credit Ea for the most part with good-will and beneficent acts towards mankind.[940]
Prominent among these stands out his revelation, by means of a dream, to Utnapishti of the all-destroying flood, which the gods, wroth at the sins of mankind, had ordained, and his command forthwith to build a ship, whose size and shape, etc., are given with much precision, e.g. it was coated inside and out with bitumen and divided into cells. On this Utnapishti and his family and servants embarked, after bringing on board all the gold and silver they could collect, and “seeds of life of all kinds,” and beasts, both domestic and wild.[941]
The Sumerian original of the Babylonian Deluge story, which has now been recovered, corresponds with the main features of the later version.
In both a flood is sent to destroy mankind, but in the first the intention of the gods is revealed in time to a pious Sumerian, possibly a priest king, Ziudsuddu, the Sumerian equivalent of the abbreviated Semitic name Utnapishti. He escapes from the flood in a great boat, which floats away on the waters. When the storm after seven days[942] has abated and the sun at last struggled out, Ziudsuddu makes a thanksgiving sacrifice of an ox and a sheep. We find him in the end reconciled with the great gods, who, as in the Babylonian version, give him immortality.
From the incompleteness of the text it is impossible to determine whether in the Sumerian version the episode of the birds occurs; the probability is that it did not. As is but natural, the earlier story is simpler and more primitive in style than the Babylonian.[943]
In the Gilgamesh account of the Flood, which in general resembles the story as given by Berosus, the absence of the raven, in the Bible the return of the dove with an olive leaf in her mouth, proclaims the abating of the waters, while the Algonkins allot the rôle, on the failure of the raven, to the muskrat. But, in the Indian legend it is a fish, not a god, which not only conveys to Manu the beneficent warning of the coming deluge but also saves him eventually by drawing his ship to a northern mountain.[944]
CHAPTER XXXV
FISH—VIVARIA—THE FIRST INSTANCE OF POACHING
We find in two important sources of our knowledge of Assyria (proper) references to beasts or fishes of the sea and of the river.
The first occurs in The Broken Column of Tiglath-Pileser I., in whose reign Assyria attained to high prosperity. This king, the first of that country to leave behind a detailed record of his achievements, was, as we have seen, a mighty hunter. After recounting his many military campaigns he adds in Column IV. a list of the beasts and fish which he had taken in his hunting expeditions. The text runs:—
1. The gods Ninurta and Nergal, who loved his priesthood, (the task) of hunting in the field,
2. Entrusted unto him, and in ships of the land of Arvad
3. he sailed, and he slew a mighty dolphin in the sea.[945]
Then follows a catalogue raisonné of his famous Zoo, in which were collected the elephants, lions, mountain-goats, stags, dromedaries, which he captured himself or obtained (antedating Hagenbeck) “through merchants whom he had sent out,” and other numerous “wild beasts and fowl of the Heaven that fly, the work of his hands, their names together with (the number of) the beasts which my ( ) did not record ... have I recorded.” In addition to these, of which “he caused their herds to bring forth young,” we find—
29. “A great pagûtu, a crocodile, a hippopotamus (?), and beasts of the Great Sea,
30. the king of Musrê sent unto him and caused the people of his land to behold.”
We cannot determine what one of the subjects of this gift, “a great pagûtu,“ exactly was. Tum-su-hu may possibly be the equivalent of the Egyptian emsah, Arabic timsâh, i.e. a crocodile. If so, Musrê must indicate Egypt.[946]
The Annals of Aṣur-Nasirpal form our second document of knowledge. The walls of his palace, lined with sculptures in relief, represent his exploits in the field of battle and in the chase. Details are most carefully and elaborately carved; the designs mark the acme of Assyrian art.
In Column III. he records[947]
“Some men I took alive and impaled them on stakes over against their cities.[948]
At that time I marched into the district of Lebanon, and unto the Great Sea.
In the Great Sea I washed my weapons and I made offering unto the gods.
The tribute of the kings of the sea from the lands of the men of Tyre and Sidon and Arvad, which lieth in the midst of the sea, silver and gold and a great pagûtu and a small pagûtu and ivory and a dolphin, a creature of the sea, I received as tribute from them, and they embraced my feet.”
This “washing,” or as it has otherwise been rendered “dipping,” of a weapon in the sea is not to be taken, as it sometimes is, in a sense suggesting fishing by a harpoon or spear, or as typical of victory, but rather as a symbolical act of homage and propitiation to the unknown deities of the deep.
A later Assyrian king, Asurbanipal, no doubt from the value which the test of use in his many hunting expeditions afforded, regarded the dog from a point of view very different from that apparently taken by some of his subjects.
To judge by an old Assyrian prayer, “From the dog, the snake, and the scorpion, and whatever is baneful may Merodach preserve us,” the general feeling was that of fear.
But five clay models preserve for us representations of some of the king’s favourite hounds, with their names inscribed upon them. The appropriateness of their names betrays their master’s familiarity with canine traits, as we detect from Chaser of the Wicked, Conqueror of the Foe, Biter of his Enemy, Mighty in his help, He crossed the road and did his bidding![949]
At Harrān (according to al-Nadim), dogs were considered sacred and had offerings made unto them, a statement which is strengthened by the divine title at Harrān of My Lord with the Dogs, which seemingly points to Marduk and his four dogs, the name of one of which, Iltebu, “the Howler,” is as characteristic to-day as it was five thousand years ago.
In the Bible it is curious to note the low position of the dog. It is rarely spoken of with approval. Possibly the existence and proclivities of the numerous packs of pariah dogs account for the fact. Tobit seems the only person who makes his dog his companion, and then only when on journeys.[950]
Over two hundred kinds of fish are enumerated in the catalogue of Asurbanipal’s library at Nineveh: the attachment of the fish determinative constitutes our authority. No writer, even Dr. Boulenger, has classified or identified the fishes of Assyrian representations as thoroughly as Montet and others have those of the hieroglyphs.
The task would seem more formidable, for two reasons: first, the short time that cuneiform as compared with hieroglyph writing has been deciphered, and the wider study which Egyptian excavation has attracted; and second, the Assyrian artist treated his subjects more generally and more conventionally than his confrères in Egypt. Although in the sea and river scenes fish and shells are introduced, scarcely any distinctions mark particular ichthyic species. Contrast with this the representations of the return of Hatasu’s expedition from the land of Punt or Arabia. Here the artists depict the fishes so characteristically that Doenitz has identified them as belonging to the Red Sea, and even determined the species of each.
We can recognise in the rivers, crabs, sometimes with a fish caught in their claws, eels (or water-snakes), and small turtles. When the sculptor wished to indicate the sea, he made these fish larger, and to emphasise his point added others, which are only inhabitants of salt water, e.g. the star-fish.[951]
Within the last five years identification[952] of Mesopotamian fish has been carried further by Dr. Harri Holma of Helsingfors,[953] and by Professor Langdon.[954]
From the latter I take the following list:—
“1. The buradu, of the skate and ray type. This flat fish is the most common of all species in Southern Babylonia from the earliest historical period. The Sumerians knew it as the _suḥuru_ fish, and speak of it as ‘bearded,’ referring to a kind of skate fish with long hairs about the mouth. They mention also the ‘goat-skate,’ and the ‘lower lipped skate.’ Dr. Holma’s statement (p. 96) that the _suḥuru_ cannot be the skate, turbot, or plaice, because these have no beards, has been contraverted, since fish of the skate type often have long feelers at the mouth resembling a beard.
“2. The kuppû, said to be the rhombus maximus.
“3. The šênu, in Greek σάνδαλον, in Latin solea, in English ‘sole.’ S̆ênu means ‘sandal’ in Babylonian.
“4. Sêlibu, or ‘fox fish,’ perhaps so-called from its slyness; probably Alopecias vulpes.
“5. The kalbu, ‘dog-fish,’ said to be the Greek καρχαρίας κύων.
“6. The piazu, ‘pig-fish,’ Galeus canis, ‘sea sow,’
“7. The puḥadu, ‘lamb fish,’ perhaps Pelecus cultratus.
“8. The balgu, a fish well known in all periods, and said to be the same as the widely spread Mongolian balyq, the ordinary word for fish in Turkish; in some parts the sword fish, in others the ‘bull head.’
“9. The qarshu, probably the ‘shark,’ or a fish of prey of the Persian Gulf.
“10. The gallabu, ‘barber,’ not yet identified.
“11. The simunu, ‘swallow fish,’ by some identified with the ‘flying fish.’
“12. The zingur, supposed to be the ‘sturgeon.’”
Other fish names, especially Sumerian, remained unidentified till (in May, 1918), Langdon translated the only hymn (yet published) to Ninâ, the Fish Goddess, and spouse of Tammuz. Among its twelve fish we get the ‘electric fish’ (query the νάρκη), the ‘nun fish,’ the ‘fire fish of the sea,’ and the ‘swallow fish.’ The touching lines bewailing the death of Tammuz are, alas! imperfect.[955]
Fish abounded in the Two Rivers. Euphrates fish were so plentiful that they could be caught simply in one’s hand, apparently without any “tickling.”[956] The coast folk could not cope with their catches.[957] Wicker traps, automatically opened and shut by the tides, yielded their “harvest of ocean.”
Sluice gates were far commoner in Assyria than in Palestine. The numerous rivers, and scientific system of irrigation which from earliest ages threaded Sumeria and later on Western Assyria, account for the frequency.
According to Sir W. Willcocks, “The granary of the ancient is destined to be that of the modern world.” The success of the irrigation works, at Hit and elsewhere, may verify his prediction.[958]
Vivaria, or fish-dams, known only late in Palestine, were early and generally constructed in Mesopotamia. As adjuncts of Sumerian temples, they can be traced as far back as 2500 b.c. No decent-sized township eventually lacked, or could afford to lack, these piscinæ with their ever-ready supply of fresh fish.
The keeper, or fisherman, attached to the temples (according to Langdon) seems to have been called Essad, a term which subsequently came to mean Tax Gatherer. It is open to doubt whether the latter meaning can, as has been suggested, be derived from or connected with the former on account of his extraction of a toll for fish caught by the public in the stew-ponds of the priests, or of a percentage, in lieu of pay, of the fish caught by him for use in the temples.
How real was the importance attached to fish, and how recognised its value as a food, can be discerned from early Sumerian documents. The excavations of Telloh furnish an elaborate description of the new temple built by Gudea in honour of Ningirsu. We read that with this god went also other deities, such as his musician, his singer, his cultivator of lands, and his guardian of fishponds.[959]
Then, again, among the officials who were deprived of office by Urukagina, on account of the profits illegally secured by farming out the public revenue, we come across the Inspectors of Fisheries. The drastic reforms and the thorough cleansing of the bureaucracy initiated by this monarch sprang from his desire to improve the condition of his poorer subjects, who for years had suffered from the oppression of the rich or the venality of public functionaries. How general and how numerous vivaria had early become shows in the plaint that “if a poor man built himself a fishpond, his fish was taken; he received neither payment nor redress.”
A document of the twenty-first century brings to light further evidence of the economic importance of fish and of the rights of fishing, and what to us modern fishermen is of intenser interest—the first case on record of Poaching!
This occurred in the reign of Samsu-iluna, the successor to the great Hammurabi. The latter’s Code of laws of 287 sections was considered on its discovery some twenty years ago to be a Digest of Babylonian decisions, but the recent finding of a clay tablet, clearly the prototype of the Code, proves its Sumerian origin.
It not only illuminates vividly the social and economic conditions of Babylon, but established for generations the status, the rights, the duties flowing from contracts or arising from injury.
Its scope is curiously wide. It includes, for instance, provisions to meet such rare cases as injuries which resulted in the miscarriage of women. The similarity of enactment in these cases and in divorces demonstrates inter alia how marked was the Code’s influence on the Mosaic legislation some seven centuries later.
Every one of Hammurabi’s subjects could by its help acquire a clearer conception of his individual property. The letter or rescript of Samsu-iluna shows that rights of fishing were acknowledged and enforceable.
The Rescript runs:—
“Unto Sin-idinnam, Kar-Sippar, and the Judges of Sippar say, Thus saith Samsu-iluna. They have reported (unto me) that the ships of the fishermen go down unto the district of Rabīm and to the district of Shakanīm and catch fish. I am therefore sending (unto thee) an official of the Palace Gate. When he shall reach thee, the ships of the fishermen which are in the district of Shakanīm (shalt thou ...[960]) and thou shalt not again send the ships of the fishermen down into the district of Rabīm or the district of Shakanīm.”[961]
This letter confirms what had previously been only surmised, viz. that the inhabitants of certain districts had enjoyed the exclusive right of fishing in their home waters. “It has already been inferred,” King continues, “that the duty of repairing the banks of rivers and canals, and of clearing the waterways, fell upon the owners of property along the banks, and it was no doubt as a compensation for this enforced service (or corvée) that the fishing in these waters was preserved.”
Mesopotamia and Armenia did not lack in fish of unusual, even fatal, properties. Thus of certain fishes near Babylon Ælian tells us[962] on the authority of Theophrastus, when the irrigation streams were without water, they remained in any small hole which was moist or held a little water, and were able to find a living in the herbage which grew in the dry channels, etc. Pliny (IX. 83) gives a somewhat similar story but a more detailed description of these fish, which “have heads like sea-frogs, the remaining parts like gudgeons, but the gills like other fish.” Emerging from their water holes, they travel on land for food, moving along with their fins, aided by a rapid movement of their tail. If pursued, they retreat to their holes and make a stand.
He notices too the stay-at-homeness of the fish in the Tigris and of those in the lake Arethusa. Though the river flows in and out of the lake, the denizens of the one are never to be found in the other. We discern the reason for such estranged relations in his previous sentence, “the waters of the lake support all weighty substances and exhale nitrous vapours.”[963] Ktesias mentions a spring in Armenia, the fishes of which are quite black and, if eaten, prove instantly fatal.[964]
The only spring of sweet-smelling water “in toto orbe,” Chabura, lies in Mesopotamia. The reason (according to legend) for its possessing this unique property was because in it the Queen of Heaven, Juno, or presumably her Babylonian counterpart, was wont to bathe.[965] But Pliny fails to indicate whether the unique scent was an effort of Nature to supply a bath meet for the Queen of Heaven, or was merely a by-product of her lavation. Possibly the fish of Chabura (like the thyme fish) exhaled a “most sweet scent,” and so effected “the sweet smelling.” But probably to preserve their power, “they will come to feed from men’s hands.”[966]
I have adduced sufficient proof that fish were plentiful in Mesopotamia. Additional testimony has needlessly been sought in Professor Sayce’s now fairly accepted suggestion that the ideogram for Nineveh implies the House of the Waters or of Fish.[967]
Another explanation of Nineveh as The Lady of the Waters deduces from Ninâ (said to be a daughter of Ea and a fish goddess) lengthening into Nineveh. But the term The Lady, i.e. The Lady par excellence, in Assyrian especially applies to Bêlit the spouse of Asur, who became generally identified with Ishtar of Nineveh.[968]
If The Lady of the Waters translate correctly the ideogram of Nineveh, the term may have sprung from a temple to this reputed Fish Goddess standing in that city. But even if the existence of such a temple can be inferred, its original site probably lay in Sumerian Lagash, not in Nineveh.
CHAPTER XXXVI
FISH IN OFFERINGS, AUGURIES, ETC.
The Sumerian records leave no possibility of doubt as to offerings of fish being made to the deities, not exclusively or specially to a deity of fish. They show Eannatum in early days offering at Telloh certain fish to various gods to secure their aid that the treaty which he had just concluded with the city of Umma might be maintained for all time unbroken.
Similar offerings present themselves all through the history of Assyria. Numerous tablets detailing the nature of the enjoined offerings include fish, and as numerous receipts by the temples acknowledge offerings of fish.[969] In the course of time votive offerings in ivory and bronze, etc., according to King, took the place of actual fish.[970]
The striking resemblance of the institution of the Scape-Goat in Palestine to the ancient Mashhulduppu or Babylonian Scape-Goat, both in object and high ceremonial ritual, is noted in my Jewish chapter.[971] But we cannot for one moment assume that sacrifices and oblations in Assyria evolved from perhaps the earliest primitive, i.e. human, sacrifice, or followed the same lines as those of Israel or of Rome. In the first nation human sacrifice probably prevailed in the earlier times to a wide extent, and in the second (as Varro indicates) “Populus pro se ignem animalia mittit,” and even “pisciculum pro animis humanis” became a not unusual and cheaper alternative.[972]
On the other hand, we possess, in historic and prehistoric Assyria, no trustworthy evidence of human sacrifice. Sayce, it is true, in 1875 published two texts, which, as he translated, demonstrated that human sacrifice did prevail. These, refuted by Ball, are not accepted as even a proper translation of the passage, much less a proof of the practice.
Jastrow has recently returned to the charge. He suggests that, “His eldest son shall he burn at the Khamm of Adad,” and other passages, establish that at one time children were offered in sacrifice, very much on the same lines as the later Judæan immolation of their children to Moloch, as when King Ahaz (2 Kings xvi. 3) “made his son to pass through the fire” in the Tophet just outside the gates of Jerusalem. But Jastrow finds even less favour now than Sayce did forty years ago.[973]
Campbell Thompson, after remarking that the existence of human sacrifice among either the Babylonian or Assyrian is not easy of satisfactory proof, concludes, “The fact is that human sacrifice goes out in proportion as civilisation comes in, and probably by the time men are ready to commit their religious ritual to writing, human sacrifice has ceased to be a regular and periodic rite: as the Assyrians were the highest civilised of all the Semites before our era, so in all probability fewest traces of this custom exist in their records.”
A semi-religious practice, not dissimilar in object to that of the Scape-Goat, can be discerned, if not as a vehicle for carrying away all the sins of the people, yet as a method of ridding the individual by the agency of some beast or fish of the affliction which lay upon him.
In one of the so-called Penitential Psalms or incantations, which the tablets from the library of Asur-bani-pal bequeath us, the prayerful desire to be free of suffering finds utterance in:—
“Let me cast off my evil that the birds may fly up to Heaven with it, That the fish may carry off my affliction.”
This whole passage ought, however, to be regarded not as a Penitential Psalm so much as “a ceremony for cleansing a man from tabu, when he wishes to see something in a dream. It finds close connection with the Levitical charm, originating from sympathetic magic, e.g. for cleansing the leper or leprous house,” i.e. by the two doves, as in Leviticus xiv. 4.[974]
Langdon asserts that in the Sumero-Babylonian religion each individual in normal conditions was guided by a divine spirit or god (cf. the δαὶμων of Socrates and the genius of the Romans). When a man was possessed by the powers of evil he was estranged from his personal god, because some demon had attacked or driven out the protecting deity from his body. In this ancient period there seems to be no moral element whatever in the case. If a man became tabu (which the eating of fish in other countries than Assyria would involve), or possessed by some dangerous unclean power, which made him unholy and filled him with bodily or mental distress, this state came about solely because at some unguarded moment a demon had expelled the indwelling god.
The demon had to be exorcised by some method of atonement, of which the most important element was in Sumerian magic water, in Hebrew blood. “In view of the great influence which Babylonian magic appears to have exerted upon the Hebrew rituals, it is curious it did not succeed in banishing this gross Semitic practice. Blood of animals does not occur as a cleansing element in Babylonia,” an omission due apparently to the culture of the Sumerians “not permitting such crude ideas, and to their teaching those Semites with whom they came in contact a cleaner form of magic.”[975]
In addition to the demons or spirits described above we find others, which could and, unless the proper rites were paid to the dead, did affect the living. The greatest misfortune which could befall a man was to be deprived of proper burial.[976] His shade, ran the common belief, could not reach Arallū, but wandered disconsolately about the earth. When driven by pangs of hunger it perforce ate the offal or leavings of the street. As the Egyptians, to ensure the continued existence of the dead and his ka, provided sepulchral offerings (the depictments of which included fish[977]), so did the Babylonians, not only for a similar but also for the additional purpose of preserving themselves from torments.
To leave a body unburied was not unattended with danger to the living. The shade of the dead man might bewitch any person it met and cause him grievous sickness. The wandering shade of a man was called ekimmu, i.e. spectre. Only sorcerers possessed the power of casting a spell whereby the ekimmu might be made to harass a man. On the other hand, the spectre sometimes settled on a man of its own accord, in the hope that its victim would be driven to give it burial to free himself from its clutches.[978]
The Babylonian conception of the condition of the dead was an utterly joyless one. Arallū, or the House of the Dead, was dark and gloomy. Its dwellers never beheld the light of the sun, but sat in unchanging gloom. The Babylonians possessed no hope of a joyous life beyond the grave, nor did they imagine a paradise in which the deceased would live a life similar to that on earth.
The nature of the under-world can be gathered from the description given to Gilgamesh by the spirit of Enkidu risen from the grave (sometimes cited as an instance of necromancy), “the place where was the worm that devoured, and where all was cloaked in dust.”[979] The Hymn of the Descent of Ishtar into Hell goes farther:
“To the land whence none return, the place of darkness, To the house wherein he who enters is excluded from the light, To the place where dust is their bread and mud their food.”[980]
The very curious bronze of the Le Clerq collection in Paris, in which ichthyic garments and gods of the under-world, Arallū, occur, must be my excuse for this too lengthy and almost fishless digression on the Babylonian dead. It shows several figures, two clad in garments of the form of a fish, with their scales very visible.
Two explanations of the bronze have been offered. The first, hitherto generally accepted, suggests that the figures are representations of the gods of the under-world, or of the dead waiting on a sick person, together with some demons of the under-world and two priests wearing fishlike raiment.[981]
My friend Professor Langdon has furnished me with another explanation, more detailed and more interesting.
This so-called representation of a scene in the lower world from a bronze talisman has been misunderstood. The obverse has three registers. In the upper register are depicted the seven devils, all with animal heads, in attitude of ferocious attack upon a human soul. The middle register represents a sick man who is supposed to be possessed by the seven devils. He lies upon a bed. At his head and feet stand two priests each arrayed to appear like fish: these are symbolic of Ea, god of the sea and patron of all magic. They clothed themselves in a fishlike robe to signify that they derived their divinations and incantations from the sacred water, of which Ea was the god.
In the lower register are drawings of cult utensils, such as holy water bowls, censers, etc., and of the fever demon Labartu, who has been driven from the body of the man and is in flight by boat. The reverse of this bronze has in deep relief one of the seven devils who is in the act of peering over the upper edge of the bronze, and gazing upon the scene of atonement and magical healing below.
The cuneiform texts prescribe that fumigation, either for cleansing a person or exorcising a demon, may be performed by the wizard, with or without a censer, a bowl, or lighted torch.[982]
Apart from its permeation of Israel in legislation as indicated in connection with Hammurabi’s Code, the influence of Assyria stands out in other ways clearly. The semi-similarity of treatment of the Deluge has already been noticed, while the rendering in the stories of Sargon and Moses of a widespread legend[983] differs only in such points of detail as the substitution of the Nile or (according to Arabic tradition) of a fish-pond for the Euphrates, and of the irrigator Akki as the discoverer of the chest of reeds for Pharaoh’s daughter.[984]
“My lowly mother conceived me, in secret she brought me forth: She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she closed my door: She cast me into the river, which rose not over me: The river bore me up, unto Akki the irrigator it carried me.
And for ... four years I ruled the kingdom.”
The assertion that the Old Testament is fairly saturated with Babylonian culture and folklore, and that even in the days of the New Testament we have not passed beyond the sphere of its impression hardly overshoots the mark, when the similarity of these and other instances is borne in mind.
The earliest point of contact between Babylon and Palestine is recorded in Genesis xiv. 1, which makes Abraham the contemporary of “Amraphel King of Shinar,” who most probably can now be identified with Hammurabi in the light of the recent discoveries of Kugler.[985]
The first connection of Israel with Assyria proper occurs in the reign of Shalmaneser II., in whose Monolith Inscription figures, as one of the allies of Benhadad I. of Damascus, the name of Ahâbbu Sir’lai, generally identified with Ahab, King of Israel.
Fish are discovered playing a part in auguries and divinations very similar to their rôle in Rome. Augury in both nations was regarded with deep veneration. It reached in Assyria a very high plane. It was practised as a recognised science by a large and organised body of the priesthood under the direct control and patronage of the King.
All strange occurrences in heaven or earth were referred to the seers. Almost every event of common life was believed by the pious Babylonian to require prophetic decision whether it boded well or ill.
Among the reforms undertaken by Urukagina was that of the college of the diviners, for he tells us that “he, who hitherto received one shekel for his work, took money no more.”
In the letters of Hammurabi these diviners were recognised as a regular Guild. Knowledge of the tablets of recorded answers, which, suiting the individual circumstances of each interrogator, had for generations been stored in the library, enabled them to render an interpretation of practically all events. Their forecasts had resort not only to astrology, but to other means, such as the observations of the movements of fish, of the flight of birds, and of the entrails and livers of sheep and other sacrificial animals, all of which were the subject of minute inspection.
The Babylonians in seeking to determine the future watched carefully the movements, etc., of fish. Although the greater part of the known divination tablets regarding fish omens are in a sad state of preservation, the following will serve as an example: “If fish in a river keep in a school and steadily face up stream, in that place will be peaceful habitation,” a deliverance hardly fraught with comfort at times of flood or drought!
Then again the passage (in Ezekiel xxi. 21-22), “The King of Babylon stood at the parting of the way, at the head of the two ways, to use divination: he shook the arrows to and fro, he consulted the teraphim, he looked in the liver,” etc., is of great interest, as evidence that the Babylonians employed both Belomancy or divination by arrows, and Hepatoscopy or inspection of the liver.
Belomancy was practised by other nations,[986] notably in Arabia (as witness Mohammed’s command against the use of arrows, “an abomination of Satan’s work!”)[987] more frequently than in Babylonia. There it attained but secondary importance. The general method required the shaking or shuffling before the image or the sacred place of the deity of a set of arrows. In the temple of Mecca the three important arrows were named, The Commanding, The Forbidding, The Waiting.
Hepatoscopy: the liver among the Assyrians, the Jews,[988] the Greeks, and the Etruscans,[989] contested with the heart the honour of being the central organ of life. Its convulsive movements, when taken from the sacrificed victim, gave warnings of the future. So sacred was the liver held in Israel, that eating it was forbidden: it had to be returned to the Giver of Life.[990]
Fish were early utilised for the calendar of the year. The signs of the Zodiac showing Pisces, possibly derived from connection with the god of water, and Scorpio, possibly representing one of the Crustacea, date back to c. 3000 b.c.[991]
CHAPTER XXXVII
THE FIGHT BETWEEN MARDUK AND TIĀMAT
Following my usual course of ending the chapter on each nation with a legend or story, in which fish or ichthyic monsters figure as direct or indirect agents of some important event, I subjoin the only myth in Assyrian literature which comes within this category, viz. the famous fight between Marduk and Tiāmat, the monstrous creature of the deep.
Tiāmat, with her consort Apsū, had revolted against the gods and brought into being a brood of monsters to destroy them. So formidable seemed her forces that all appeals by Anshar, the leader of the gods, to Anu, and then to Ea, were made in vain. No god would “face the music,” till Marduk was prevailed upon to become their champion. Nor does this grand refusal seem unnatural, when we read of Tiāmat’s dimensions.
“Fifty Kasbu, or more correctly Biru (i.e. 300 miles), was her length, one Kasbu (six miles) was her breadth, half a rod was her mouth;” and the rest of her body of proportionate bulk![992] Nor again is it unnatural that at—
“The lashing of the water with her tail, All the Gods in heaven were afraid.”
How pigmy in comparison with Tiāmat appears the decadent sea-dragon mentioned by Ignatius, on whose gut, 120 feet long, in the library of Constantinople were written in letters of gold the Iliad and the Odyssey!
Allied with Tiāmat in her fight were—
“Spawned sea-serpents, Sharp of teeth and cruel of fang.”
“With poison instead of blood she has filled their bodies, And mighty tempests, and the fishman,[993] and the ram,[994] They bear merciless weapons without fear of the fight.”
Beowulf in his famous battle with the Dragon stands out as nobler and braver than Marduk, inasmuch as he, a man, to free his country from the Dragon’s toll of death and ravage, of his own volition seeks out the monster. He “attacks alone, for being altogether fearless he scorned to take an army against the foe,” whereas Marduk—the god—was compelled to the duel, since he was unable to enlist a single god. Beowulf “counted not the worm’s warring for aught,” whereas Marduk among his preparations,
“Made a net to enclose the inward parts of Tiāmat And the four winds he set so that nothing of her might escape.”
The protagonists (literally protagonists, for behind Marduk cowered the shrinking gods, and behind Tiāmat her spouse and her spawned monsters) on meeting consume time, quite in the grand Homeric manner, by launching taunts and reproaches at each other.
Eventually Marduk, after spreading out his net to catch her, seems to have anticipated the gassing tactics of the Huns by many millenniums, and owing to the absence of a mask with even greater success, for—
“The evil wind, that was behind, he let loose in her face,[995] As Tiāmat opened her mouth to its full extent. He drove in the evil wind, while she had not yet shut her lips. The terrible winds filled her belly, And her courage was taken from her and her mouth she opened wide. His spear he seized, and broke through her belly, He severed her inward parts, he pierced her heart.”
THE FIGHT BETWEEN MARDUK AND TIĀMAT.
Then for a while Marduk rested but, arising,
“He split her body up like a flat fish into two halves. One half of her he set in place as a covering for the heavens. He fixed a bolt, he stationed watchmen, And bade them not to let her waters come forth.”
Finally to their hero and saviour the gods accord a triumphant welcome, and
“Presents and gifts they brought unto him.”[996]
JEWISH FISHING
TOBIAS, IN La Madonna del Pesce, BY RAPHAEL.
JEWISH FISHING[997]
CHAPTER XXXVIII
ROD NOT EMPLOYED IN SPITE OF CLOSE INTERCOURSE WITH EGYPT—
REASONS SUGGESTED FOR ABSENCE
The absence of any mention of Angling in Israel, and in Assyria causes wonder and surprise, especially when we remember that the relations of both nations in trade and intercourse with Egypt, where Rod fishing did obtain, appear when at peace constant and close.[998]
In the Assyrian chapter the vexed question of the earliest date assignable for the invasion or cultural permeation of Egypt by Sumerian or Semitic influences has been considered, and the conflicting views stated.
A fair consensus of agreement holds that the Hyksos sprang from Semitic stock; but the dates suggested for their conquest of Egypt vary from 2540 down to 1845 b.c.[999]
However this may be, the definite association with Egypt of that branch of the Semitic tribes destined in Jacob’s lifetime (Gen. xlvii. 27) to be known as Israelites,[1000] begins with the advent of Abram into that country.
King, Rogers, and Jastrow in their later works have seemingly adopted the date arrived at by Kugler from stellar researches for the first Babylonian Dynasty. If Abram were, as is now thought, the contemporary of Hammurabi, his flitting must have occurred between 2120 and 2080 b.c., but since Egyptian chronology beyond the fifteenth century is fluid, and no early positive synchronisms with Babylon survive, we cannot definitely designate any particular king in Egypt as the contemporary of either Hammurabi or Abram.
The Bible is our main authority for the continuance of the association. The stories of Jacob, of Joseph (in whose title Abrek[1001] some detect a Babylonian influence and a connection with that of Abara-rakku, the designation of one of the five great officers of state), and of Moses, are but episodes of an intercourse which, if we begin with Abram and end with Onias, lasted (with intervals of war and invasion) for some 2000 years.
Evidence of intercourse crops up again and again throughout the four centuries of the Jewish Monarchy. Thus we read (1 Kings iii. 1) of the marriage of Solomon with the daughter of Pharaoh. From Solomon’s reign onward till the birth of Christ and long afterwards, the connection between Egypt and Israel, friendly or hostile, never fails. The flight of Jeroboam to Shishak (1 Kings xi. 40) and the giving of presents, probably tribute, by Hosea to the King of Egypt (2 Kings xvii. 4) present but two instances.
Papyri recently discovered prove the settlement near Assouan of a considerable Jewish, or rather, more correctly, Palestinian colony from (say) 500-400 b.c. This, like the similar but older community at Tahpanhes, exhibits a mart of wide and keen trading. The papyri “show that the Aramaic—the common language of Syria—was regularly used at Syene (Assouan), and we readily see how five cities in the land of Egypt speak the language of Canaan and swear to Yahweh of Hosts (Isaiah xix. 18) as the oath in these papyri is by Yahu.”[1002]
A PRE-INCA FISHING SCENE. (c. 200 b.c.)
Reproduced from T. A. Joyce’s South American Archæology.
After the destruction of Jerusalem by Antiochus Epiphanes, the petition by Onias to Ptolemy Philometor for permission to erect a central temple for the benefit of the many thousands of his compatriots resident in Egypt concludes the historical evidence that I call as to the continuance of the Egyptian-Israelitish connection. Its survival for centuries after the birth of our Lord is a matter of common knowledge.
The existence of this connection rests not merely on historical evidence. Recent excavations in Southern Palestine tell the same tale, or even carry it still farther back, to pre-Israelite Canaan. Thus, after referring to the tale of Sinuhé (c. 1970 b.c.), Professor G. Barton writes, “There was apparently considerable trade with Egypt at this time. Men from Palestine often went there for this purpose. Such traders are pictured in an Egyptian tomb of this period. Trade with Egypt is also shown to have existed by the discovery of Egyptian scarabs of the time of the Middle Kingdom in the excavations at Gaza, Jericho, and Megiddo. As Egypt was nearer, and commerce with it easier, its art affects the arts of Palestine more than the art of Babylon.”[1003]
R. A. Macalister[1004] writes: “Meanwhile the oldest foreign civilisation of whose influence definite relics have come to light within the land of Palestine is that of Egypt under the XIIth Dynasty.” The assertion that “almost every spadeful of earth which is turned over in Southern Palestine brings to light more evidence of Egyptian influence” seems hardly an exaggeration.[1005]
But, it may be asked, what has all this got to do with fishing? Of itself and in itself apparently nothing.
The introduction, however, of the historical facts cannot be branded as irrelevant. They demonstrate a constant association for over two millenniums with Egypt, and the deep influence of Egyptian civilisation and methods of life on Jewish policy.
And yet, notwithstanding such intercourse and such cultural influence, we can nowhere in the literature of the Bible or of the Rabbis discern either a direct mention, or (as I hope to show) an implied allusion to the use of the Rod, which as a weapon both for market and sport from c. 2000 b.c. found favour in Egypt.[1006]
The same holds true of the Land of the Two Rivers; in no Assyrian sculpture, on no Assyrian seal, can we detect any delineation or any suggestion of angling, although instances of other kinds of fishing occur frequently.[1007]
In no book of the Old or of the New Testament can be found any direct mention of the Rod. In the Talmud—a vast work of teaching and discussion—the same silence prevails. The authoritative Talmudische Archäologie (by S. Krauss, 1910) gives us fishful places such as Lake Tiberias, and many points of ichthyic or piscatorial interest such as the hook, the line, salted fish, garum, etc., but contains no reference to the Rod.[1008] Mr. Breslar, it is true, has recently girded up his loins to establish that in the Bible and the Talmud can be found at any rate the implied use of the Rod, but to a practical angler quite unconvincingly.[1009]
To account for this absence of direct mention of the Rod in the Bible various reasons have been adduced.
The first: in the only two passages, Isaiah xix. 8, and Habakkuk i. 15, where the word “angle” occurs, and in Matthew xvii. 27, “cast a hook,” and in Amos iv. 2, as contended by Mr. Breslar, its use is certainly implied. The validity of this claim remains a question (A) for Hebrew scholars, and (B) for practical fishermen.
From the point of view of the latter, the “casting,” “taking,” etc., in the above passages can be and probably were accomplished by a hand-line (with or without a weight attached to insure greater length of throw) almost as easily and as effectually as if a Rod were employed. As a matter of fact, for taking good-sized fish some of our professional sea-fishermen prefer the hand-line to that of the Rod.
The words in Matthew xvii. 27, “go thou to the sea and cast a hook” do not either in the Greek or English strongly suggest, much less necessarily imply, a Rod. To a professional fisherman of the Sea of Tiberias like Peter, the more natural, probably the only known method of casting would be by a hand-line.
Turning now to the Hebrew passages, Isaiah xix. 8, “The fishers shall also lament, and all they that cast angle in the Nile (A.V., brooks) shall mourn;” Habakkuk i. 15, “He taketh up all of them with the angle, he catcheth them in his net, and gathereth them in his drag;” Job xli. 1, “Canst thou draw out leviathan with a fish-hook?” in all these we find the same Hebrew word ḥakkāh.
The R.V. in the first two renders it “angle,” and in Job “fish-hook;” in the Greek version ἄγκιστρον, which in the Septuagint is the usual and in the New Testament (Matt. xvii. 27) the only word for hook, occurs in all three passages.
Whence or from which word can the Rod be implied, or even in fairness claimed? In Isaiah, it is answered, from the words “cast in the Nile.” But in a river, as every child knows, fishing is pursued by more methods than that of the Rod. Judging from the literature of our six Nations fishing by hand-line was far and away more general than by Rod; the ratio between the two would indeed, I think, work out at some 100 to 1.
If then the words, “cast in the Nile,” do not furnish the implication claimed, can we find any other words in the three passages which do? The one word common to them all is ḥakkāh, hook: if this fail the claimants, how or whence can they establish the implication?
Let us now see whither the implication from ḥakkāh leads us. Obviously in Job, to angling with a Rod for “Leviathan” or crocodile![1010] The absurdity is already manifest. Let us, however, in our hunt for the snark-like implication examine the remaining tackle of this intrepid angler. Fortunately for us, conjecture as to the hook or the bait is unnecessary.
The Petrie collection at the University of London preserves a hook, which in Ptolemaic times was employed in the Nile for the capture—not of crocodiles—but merely of large fish, such as Lates niloticus. It measures over one foot in length, with a shank over 2½ inches in width.
The account of crocodile fishing by the Egyptians left us by Herodotus[1011] prescribes the bait—no less an one than a chine of pork. The line, then and now (ex necessitate rei), must have been of stout cord, possibly tied to a tree, with probably some protective material of horn, etc., to prevent erosion.
Conjure up the picture of this Egyptian piscator—even in this instance the Jew does not use the Rod, for there are no Leviathans in Palestine![1012] Behold him “casting,” with a Rod of ancient normal length, about six feet, with a rope line of ancient normal length, from six to ten feet, a bait of even half the back of a porker! Surely a picture for gods and men, more especially the winners of our Casting Competitions, to revere with awe and envy, as a feat of strength and skill unessayable.
From these three passages I can find no reason, contextual or piscatorial, to support the contention that the Rod was used, although to us moderns such use would seem but the natural thing.
Mr. Breslar maintains that Amos iv. 2 authorises the implication. He errs either in translation or through misconception of the tackle described. The words run, “They shall take you away with hooks (ẓinnōth), and your residue with fish-hooks.” The Hebrew word for the second, ṣīrōth dūgāh, means only hooks, plain and simple, while that for the first, ẓinnōth, signifies also thorns and probably fish-spears, or harpoons.
Amos, however, far from thinking of or suggesting a Rod, is looking contrariwise at the end of a line. His metaphor is drawn from the non-angling custom prevalent and pictured in Assyrian representations of a conqueror having his captives dragged by cords fastened by presumable, but naturally not apparent, hooks firm fixed in their lips. This conception is strengthened by the fact that ḥakkāh in its primary etymological sense implies merely something connected with the jaws.[1013]
If Mr. Breslar surmises (though his words convey no such hint) that for his “rudimentary type of Rod in the Scriptures” Israel affixed a line to his fishing spear, thus squaring with my conjecture in the Introduction as to the evolution of the modern Rod, may I respectfully ask why did a race, so pre-eminently alert and proverbially acquisitive, handicap itself by the selection of such a “rudimentary type” in preference to a weapon long invented, ready to hand, and far superior?
A friend, in the hope of helping me to some authoritative information as regards Angling, suggested Jagd, Fischfang, und Bienenzucht bei den Juden in der tannäischen Zeit, by Herr Moritz Mainzer, as the very last word on Jewish fishing. Unable (owing to the War) to obtain this in book form, I tracked it eventually to some articles under the same title in the magazine, Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums (1909). Except for a pearl or two such as “Fishermen, then as now in Palestine, worked lightly dressed or naked,”—was this suggested by St. John, or P. Fletcher’s, “Now when Simon heard, he girt his fisher’s coat unto him, for he was naked”?—Fischfang (at any rate) far from rewards one’s search.
Mainzer’s two sentences (p. 463) assist not at all in determining whether or not the Jews used the Rod. “Die eigentliche ḥakkāh war ein eiserner an eine Leine (ḥebhel) befestigter Haken. Die Leine selbst konnte mit einer Rute oder einem Stabe verbunden sein der zuweilen mehrere Schnüre mit Angeln trug” (the ḥakkāh proper was an iron hook fastened to a fishing ḥebhel. This line might be attached to a rod or stick, which sometimes had on it several cords with fishing hooks).
The supporting references come from no Israelitish source, but from Assyrian representations of hand-lining in Layard’s Nineveh, and from Egyptian delineations of Rod fishing in Wilkinson’s Ancient Egyptians. Not a single word does Mainzer quote from any authority on Jewish Angling. The words, “to a Rod which sometimes had on it several cords with fishing hooks,” simply translate Wilkinson’s Plate 371.
Had I weighed the title and duly appreciated the combination of Hunting, Fishing, and Bee-culture! I would have been perhaps prepared for a disappointment, but the output of, or the “cultural associations” in, a German work often defy prediction from its mere headings. Mainzer, in his Fischfang, serves to recall Porson’s lines, which are themselves but an adaptation of a Greek epigram,[1014]
“The Germans in Greek Are sadly to seek, Not five in five score But ninety-five more. All save only Hermann, And Hermann’s a German!”
Lest my own conclusion—that neither in the Old or New Testament is the implied use of the Rod established—carry little weight, I subjoin the conclusions (stated in letters to me) arrived at by two well-known Hebrew scholars.
The first comes from Professor A. R. S. Kennedy (the writer of the article on Fishing in the Encyclopædia Biblica): “In short you are entirely justified, so far as evidence goes, in saying that the Jews did not use the Rod.”
The second comes from Dr. St. Clair Tisdall: “We find in the Bible no proof of fishing with Rod and line: on the contrary the fact that no mention whatever, direct or indirect, of the fishing Rod occurs either in the Bible or (as far as my reading goes) in the Talmud, makes it almost certain that the Rod was not used by the Jews. At any rate the use of any such instrument is not implied in either Book.”
A second reason for the absence of the Rod may be that of dates. The Jews, it might be urged, were not and could not be aware of Egyptian Angling, because it sprang up subsequent to their Exodus from the country. The reply I offer involves, it is true, that bewildering factor, Egyptian chronology. But even if a thousand years are as nothing in the sight of Manetho and many others, surely one epoch correlates with another, and the shifting of one date automatically involves the shifting of others.
The date of the Exodus, like most Egyptian dates, hitherto a matter of considerable contention, is now generally agreed as falling between 1300 and 1200 b.c. Petrie[1015] fixes on “1220 b.c. or possibly rather later,” Hanbury Brown places the Flight ten years earlier, i.e. 1230, for reasons based mainly on the stele of King Menephtah.[1016]
So if the contention that the Israelites could not well know of the Rod because of its invention after their flight holds water, any representation of Rod fishing must obviously be subsequent to the year 1230 or 1220 b.c. Only two such representations exist: (A) (in Wilkinson’s Plate 370) comes from the tomb (No. 93) of Kenamūm at Thebes, and dates from about the second half of the XVIIIth Dynasty, or some 200 years before the Exodus, while (B) (in Wilkinson’s Plate 371, and in Newberry’s Beni Hasan, vol. I. Plate XXIX.) goes back to the early XIIth Dynasty or some 750 years before the Exodus.[1017]
The Exodus, whatever date be assigned, probably occurred in the time of and was occasioned by a dynasty non-Semitic, and unfavourable to Israel. The corvée enforced doubtless by the kourbash was exacted from the aliens, whose task (Exodus i. 11) included the building of two brick fortresses to block the eastern road into Egypt.
To most of us unacquainted with the making of bricks the cruelty of the Pharaonic command, “There shall be no straw given you, yet shall ye deliver the tale of bricks,” seems to consist in demanding from the sojourners the same quantity of output without their possessing, as the Egyptian workers did possess, an essential constituent in the brick-straw.
But Petrie points out that straw, so far from being an essential of the mixture, is absent from most ancient and modern bricks. The complaint arose because finely chopped straw is very useful for preventing the mud from sticking to the hand, for dusting over the ground, and for coating each lump before dropping it in the mould, thus enabling the work to go on quickly and easily. From the strawless Jew, however, was extorted for the same hours a tale of bricks equal to that of the Egyptian enjoying these advantages.
In direct opposition to Petrie, Maspero states, and Erman[1018] agrees, that the ordinary Egyptian brick, both ancient and modern, is “a mere block of mud, mixed with chopped straw and a little sand.”
Other reasons for the Jewish unfamiliarity with the Rod, viz. its merely local use, and their settlement in the North East of Egypt remote from “the River of Egypt,” would fully be met, were it not for Isaiah, with the simple statement that at present they can neither be proved nor disproved.
But the words of Isaiah xix. 8, “The fishers also shall lament, and all they that cast angle into the Nile shall mourn,” surely demonstrate—if we allow that “cast angle” is the proper technical translation, and that the two words cannot mean the mere throwing of a hook with a hand-line—that the Israelites during the 430 years (Exodus xii. 40) of their sojourn in Egypt did acquire familiarity with the methods of fishing employed by their taskmasters.
Still, even if we take it as proved that for some reason Angling was at the time of the Exodus an unknown art to the Jews, why with all the intercourse of the subsequent centuries was the knowledge of the existence and value of the Rod not acquired?[1019]
Those and other queries may have found a ready reply in the reputed but lost Book of Solomon on Fishes.[1020] It may possibly have contained some clue, such as a command or custom, totemistic or other, common to the old Semitic stock, or some trait of temperament which caused Angling to be regarded as too slow or too unremunerative a pastime.
Without its guidance one is almost driven to the conclusion that the ancient Israelites (like the early Greeks and Romans) were pot-hunters, bent on the spoil rather than on the sport of their catch, but (unlike them) continued this characteristic throughout their history, and remained to the end uninfected by the joy or passion of Angling. Their desire was fish—abundant and cheap, or better still gratis: hence when “fed up” with Manna (Numbers xi. 5) they fell a-lusting—“Who shall give us flesh to eat? We remember the fish we did eat in Egypt for nought.”
This apparent lack of the sporting instinct contrasts strangely with the fact that modern Jews rank among our foremost anglers, and that to a Jew we owe the greatest book written within the last generation, if not the practical establishment on a scientific basis of the dry-fly, that most finished form of Angling.
Dr. Kennet, Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge, while holding no brief either way, has, at my request, most kindly suggested some reasons which may conceivably account for the Biblical absence of Angling. To my mind none of these affords adequate proof of its existence.
A. The physical characteristics of the country preclude many references to fishing in the Old Testament. However keen their desire, the majority of the population were in the position of Simple Simon, when he “went a-fishing for to catch a whale.” Sea-fishing was out of the question, for with the doubtful exception of a small bit of the Galilæan coast—probably not held continuously—no part of the Mediterranean sea-shore belonged to Israel during the Monarchy, while the climate and intense heat of the Valley of the Jordan, the only real river, kept its inhabitants apart from the dwellers on the mountains.
But contra: even if the majority were Simple Simons, the numerous references (about 74) in the Bible to fishes, fishing, and fishing implements indicate a wide, if perhaps impersonal, knowledge of the practice. The fact that the larger number of these were used as metaphors or similes evidences a more than local knowledge of fishing, because for a metaphor or simile to be telling it usually must, as do the Homeric, appeal to a well-known, common, and long-established custom or craft.
B. Although fishing apparently prevailed always in the Sea of Galilee, it must be remembered that practically the whole literature of the Old Testament emanates from central and southern Palestine, and (as is the case with Egyptian literature as regards Deltaic conditions) contains but scant allusion to life among the Northern Tribes. Hence possibly the silence about the Rod, which may nevertheless have been employed.
C. The Old Testament stories, although some belong to the same period as the Homeric, are told in a manner very different from the latter. Every picture is sketched with the fewest strokes, and accordingly details are, have to be, taken for granted. Thus, although the majority of the people subsisted largely on milk, there is not one reference to milking.
But contra: this omission seems to me hardly on all fours with that of the Rod. The word milk, when not expressly limited, e.g. “of thy bosom,” or used metaphorically, signifies solely the lacteal liquid extruded from the teats of an animal, and so implies milking or a previous act of extrusion, whereas the word fishing connotes no single method of taking fish, as the Old Testament in its mention of the implements, Spear, Hook and Line, and Nets, demonstrates. Then again Job xxi. 24 (R.V. margin), “his milk-pails are full of milk,” and Judges iv. 19, “she opened a bottle of milk,” both demand an extrusion effected by one and only one method, whereas “jars of fish” may have been filled by any piscatorial method.
D. There is no evidence that the Israelites brought from Egypt a single particle of Egyptian civilisation. Nomads they were when they entered, and nomads they were when they left Egypt. Their kultur was taken over from the Canaanites, and their later civilisation, despite periods of subjection to Egypt, owed far less to that country than to Babylonia.
Even if we grant that no actual evidence of Egyptian culture exists, the probabilities incline the other way. Their abiding place was in no sterile or out-of-the-way corner of that country, but in Goshen, where we read “they gat them possessions therein,” and was in close proximity to the great high road, which bore the commerce between Egypt and Asia, and vice versâ. They were certainly familiar with the manufacture of bricks, and presumably the building of houses, etc.
E. The verse, “The fishers shall also lament and they that cast angle in the brooks shall mourn,” which may betray knowledge of the Rod, is apparently much later than Isaiah, and may, perhaps, be assigned to the second century b.c., and refer to the campaign of Antiochus Epiphanes in Egypt.
Even if we allow that this date accounts for all omission of Angling during the millennium between the Exodus and this campaign, why is there no actual or implied reference in subsequent literature, especially in the voluminous Talmud?
But the Jewish lack of sport is evidenced not only in their methods of fishing, but, what is more remarkable, in those of their hunting, or rather non-hunting. While Assyrian, Egyptian, and Persian Monarchs were famous for their hunting exploits, no single Jewish king, except Herod, is handed down to us delighting in or even taking part in the chase.[1021]
We find no Hebrew counterpart to Tiglath-Pileser, with his historical bag of “4 wild bulls mighty and terrible, 10 elephants and 120 lions ” on foot, and 130 speared from his chariot, or even of a mild understudy to Ashur-bani-pal.[1022] The Bible gives but two—Esau’s brother scarcely ranks as one—hunter-characters: Esau “a cunning hunter,” and Nimrod “a mighty hunter before the Lord.” Even the latter of these two heroes was no Israelite, but a king “of Accad,” a Sumero-Assyrian, whom some writers identify with Gilgamesh.
Such indifference to or aversion from the chase cannot either at the time of the invasion of Palestine (Exodus xxiii. 29), or subsequently be ascribed to the lack of wild beasts or of game, for we read of lions, bears, jackals, foxes, etc., and of hart, fallow deer, and antelope.
Two reasons—neither, to my mind, satisfactory—have been advanced to explain this attitude as regards hunting, a pursuit which admittedly has played, both as a necessity and a pastime, an important part in the education and evolution of mankind.
The first: the Hebrews, as described in the Old Testament, had already reached the stage of pastoral nomads, when “hunting, which is the subsistence of the ruder wanderer, has come to be only an extra means of life.”[1023]
The second: the Hebrews, hampered perhaps by certain peculiarities of their religion, or on account of the density of the population were not often induced “to revert for amusement to what their ancestors had been compelled to practise from necessity.”[1024]
Either, or both, of these reasons might have carried weight, had it not been for the existence hard by in Assyria of a people, among whom, although sprung from the Semitic stock, hunting was a recognised and popular pastime, and this despite a population far denser.
Nor, again, when we compare the culture of the two nations, can Lacépède’s previously quoted dictum that in civilisation the fisher nation is usually more advanced than the hunter nation help the Hebrews, for apart from the fact of the indisputable and immeasurable superiority of the Assyrian civilisation we discover no sign of angling in Israel.
As in their fishing, they were “out for” the meat, not for the sport, so was it, I fear, in their hunting. If they found no pleasure in the chase, they assuredly delighted in the eating of game and were dexterous trappers of animals. Their methods were:—
(a) By digging a pitfall for the larger animals, e.g. for a lion in 2 Sam. xxiii. 20;
(b) By traps, which were set in the runs of the animals (Prov. xxii. 5) and caught them by the leg (Job xviii. 9), or were set underground (ibid. 10); and
(c) By nets of various kinds—for an antelope in Isaiah (li. 20, R.V.).
CHAPTER XXXIX
FISH WITH AND WITHOUT SCALES—METHODS OF FISHING—VIVARIA
In Moses’ enumeration of what the tribesmen might or might not eat, there is a careful distinction by their names of the creatures in fur and feathers, but the fishes are merely divided (as were the animals entering the ark into “clean and unclean,” Gen. vii.) into “all that have fins and scales ye shall eat: and whatsoever hath not fins and scales ye shall not eat; it is unclean unto you” (Deut. xiv. 9, 10).
This classification has often been assumed to have been taken from the prohibitions enjoined by the Egyptian priesthood, but without any authority, because we do not know what fish were actually ruled out by their dietary canon. Moses not only limits the use of fish as an article of food, as originally granted in the covenant with Noah (Gen. ix. 2, 3), but fails to discriminate between fish from the sea and elsewhere. He does, however, exclude all scaleless fish such as the important group of siluridæ, skates, lampreys, eels, and every variety of shell fish.[1025]
As may naturally be expected, this law and other decisions, which by debarring so many species[1026] of fish denied to the people a food supply at once plentiful and cheap, were in time whittled away. Fish with “at least two scales and one fin” were gradually permitted. Eventually, as experience proved that all fish with scales have also fins, Israel was allowed as food any part of any fish on which only scales were visible.[1027]
In the west this whittling was carried even further. ’Ab. Zarah, 39 a, expressly states that no one need hesitate about eating the roe of any fish, because no unclean fish is to be found there![1028] The Jews of Constantinople in Belon’s time had more scruples; debarred of caviare proper, i.e. made from the roe of the sturgeon, they discovered an excellent and legal substitute in the roe of the Carp.
It is a strange fact that these many references to fishing neither in the Old, where they are mostly metaphorical, nor in the New Testament, where they are chiefly historical, give the specific name of a single fish family. Dag and nun are the generic terms covering all species. The large sea fish are collectively termed “tannim.”[1029] The fish of Tobit, of Jonah, of the Psalms, are only spoken of generically. None of the Apostles, of whom four, Peter, Andrew, James, and John, were professional fishermen, has troubled himself to identify by name even the actual fish of the miraculous draught.[1030]
The Jews acquired no intimate knowledge of the ichthyic branch of natural history. Although acquainted with some of the names given by the Egyptians and Alexandrians to different species (Josephus compares a fish found in the sea of Gennesaret to the Coracinus[1031]) they adopted no similar method of distinguishing them, or any classification beyond the broad division of clean and unclean. The biological knowledge concerning fish shown in the Talmud was of a very primitive order, not merely in regard to embryology and propagation, but also as to hatching.[1032]
It does, indeed, require the firmly-shut eye of faith to conceive that the fish of Raphael’s great Madonna del Pesce, which scarcely weighs two pounds and is carried on a string by the youth Tobias, can have been to him an object of danger and terror, or that it “leaped out of the river and would have swallowed him” had it not been for the Angel’s command to seize the brute (Tobit vi. 2, 3). Raphael’s cartoon is another instance of the untrammelled liberty of the Italian artist. Most of the fishes are mere nondescript piscine forms of artistic fancy, but two are certainly of the Skate or Ray family, which is never found in fresh water!
Then, again, how oddly Botticelli and other painters misconceive their man-eating fish, which must have been a crocodile strayed from the Indus or the Nile to the waters of the Tigris.
Fortunately Dr. Tristram[1033] comes to our aid as regards the fresh-water fish of modern, and probably of ancient Palestine. Of his forty-three species, only eight are common to the more westerly Mediterranean rivers and lakes. Of thirty-six found in the Jordan and its affluents, but one occurs in the ordinary Mediterranean fresh-water fauna, two in the Nile, seven in the Tigris, Euphrates, and adjacent rivers, ten in other parts of Syria, while sixteen are quite peculiar to the basin of the Jordan. The fish fauna is very isolated, but shows affinities to that of the Ethiopian zoo-geographical region, and probably dates from a geological time when the Jordan and the rivers of North-East Africa belonged to the same system.[1034]
Of these fish, two demand notice.
(1) Chromis simonis. In the rare instances where fish take any care of their eggs or young, the task nearly always devolves on the male; here, the husband performs it by taking the ova into his mouth, till their development in the large cheek-pouches causes such swelling that he is unable to use his mouth. This uncomfortable condition exists and increases until as fry about four inches long they quit the paternal abode.[1035]
(2) Clarias macracanthus, found in the Nile, as well as in the Lake of Gennesaret. In their spawning migration they have often to travel stretches of dwindling streams with water insufficient to cover them, or absent altogether.[1036] By means of an accessory bronchial organ they can live at least two whole days out of water. When they thus behold all the wonders of terrestrial existence, including its choicest perfection, Man, is it surprising that they “utter a squeaking or hissing sound,” or teste Masterman, “cat-like squeak”?
The methods of fishing in Palestine, like those (save Angling) of Egypt and the ancient world, were:—
(A) The spear, harpoon, and bident (still used in Lebanon and Syria) of which we read in Job xli. 7, “Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons, or his head with fish spears?”
(B) The line and hook. The line occurs only in Job xli. 1, “Canst thou draw out Leviathan (i.e. the crocodile) with a fish hook (ḥakkāh), or press down his tongue with a cord (ḥebel)?” (R.V.). The hook, designated by several names, finds frequent place in descriptions and metaphors in the O.T.
The difficult verse (Job xli. 2), “Canst thou put a rope (agmōn, literally, as in R.V. margin, a rope of rushes) into his (Leviathan’s) nose?” is possibly explained by the ordinary procedure of fishermen in carrying their fish.[1037] The (marginal) “rope of rushes” will recall to many a boy and many a man how often a handy rush has served for carrying home his catch of small fish. For the crocodile, however, such means of portage, as it is the intent of the verse to make clear, would in Bret Harte’s parlance be “onsatisfactory.”
The word, it has been held, probably means a ring, placed in the mouth of a fish by a rope of reeds tied to a stake, for the purpose of keeping it alive in the water. The use of a ring would give a perfect parallelism, “a ring in his nose” and “a hook in his jaw.” Benzinger, however, makes it very doubtful whether this practice of keeping fish alive by a ring ever prevailed among the Jews.
The lure, or esca, was ground bait. Travellers maintain that even now no Nile or Palestine fish is educated enough to rise to a fly. But my friend Dr. Henry Van Dyke, author of Little Rivers and other fascinating books, shows me from a diary kept during his visit to Palestine in 1907 that this rule certainly has exceptions.
Wading from shore near the mouth of a stream flowing into Lake Tiberias, and again near the head waters of the Jordan above the Lake of Merom, he found pleasant clear streams where fish took the fly willingly. Whether this departure from traditional habit was due to the skill of the super-man, or the enticing cunning of the American flies used, viz. “Queen of the Water,” “Beaverkill,” and “The Abbey” (size No. 12 American) the diarist stateth not.
(C) The hand net (ἀμφίβληστρον), mentioned in New Testament, still holds its own in the Sea of Galilee, and the coast. It in the main resembles the Roman funda.
“It is like the top of a tent in shape, with a long cord fastened to the apex. This is tied to the arm, and the net so folded that when it is thrown, it expands to its utmost circumference, around which are strung beads of lead to make it drop suddenly to the bottom. As soon as the game is spied, away goes the net, expanding as it flies, and its leaded circumference strikes the bottom ere the fish know its meshes have closed on them. By the aid of his cord the fishermen leisurely draws up the net, and the fish with it.”[1038] A fuller description of the various nets now in use on the lake, with an account of present-day methods of fishing, will be found in Dr. Masterman’s interesting volume, chap. ii, The Inland Fisheries of Galilee (also in Pal. Explor. Fund Quarterly Statement, 1908, p. 40).
Netting was the almost universal method. On Lake Tiberias (or the Sea of Galilee, or Lake of Gennesaret) which yielded then, as it does now, a most copious supply of fish, night lines and line and hook were also in vogue. The highest value was attached to these fisheries. According to tradition one of the so-called Laws of Joshua, while reserving certain privileges to dwellers on its shores, opened its waters to every comer. Weirs and fences, because of the damage their stakes inflicted on fishing boats, were strictly forbidden.
The observance of this custom may have originated from a compact made by all the tribes, as the Talmud states, or from “the blessing” (in Deut. xxxiii. 23) conditioning the allotment of the territory of Napthali and the Sea of Tiberias—“Possess thou the sea, and the south“ (“the sea” is the alternative version in R.V. for “the west”); or perhaps (according to Baba Kamma) from an absolute order of Joshua to the tribe of Napthali (Jew. Encyc., v. 404).
By law, or rather custom, fishing was, except in private vivaria, etc., universally free; thus “in the Sea of Tiberias fishing with hook and net was everywhere allowed” (Krauss, Talmud Archäol., ii. 146,) with references to Bab. Kam. 81b. Cf. the Roman Digest which lays down that “omnia animalia quæ terra, mari, cælo capiuntur, id est feræ bestiæ, et volucres, et pisces, capientium fiunt.”[1039]
Mainzer, however, severely restricts this freedom of fishing.[1040] “Incidentally information is given of a modification of the regulation. For instance, if any one set up a net on a shore or a bank, others were not allowed to fish in proximity to it. They were only allowed to cast their nets at a distance of one parasang away.”
This sentence apparently implies that the first comer to some position on land acquired a legal temporary possession of fishing for the distance of a parasang. This regulation (extracted, apparently, from the reference 5, i.e. to Baba Bathra, 21 b) came into being (according to Rabbi Gershom, as cited by Mainzer), “because the fisherman scatters bait in the water which attracts the fish to his net. But if another person sets up his net near by, the fish at the sight of the fresh bait would swim to the other spot, and so the first fisherman would suffer loss.”
The first (comer), adds Mainzer, “by the setting up of his net has acquired a priority claim over all the fish of a definite area.”
This theory of possession appears to me quite untenable, for two reasons.
The first, because no words, judgment, or even obiter dictum contained in the reference given, support it. A Rabbi’s pious opinion does not suffice, as Baba Bathra, 21b, makes clear.[1041] The passage runs:
“Rabbi Hona said, ‘If a man who lives in a passage has set up a mill, and another in the same passage comes and likewise sets up one, the former has the right to prevent him, for he can say to him, Thou cuttest off my means of livelihood.’” In support may be quoted: “The fish net must be removed from the fish which another is already trying to catch as far as to allow the fish to escape.” “How far is that?” Rabba, son of Rabbi Hona answered, “As far as a parasang.” The case is otherwise with fish to which lines have been cast.”[1042]
My second reason is the manifest absurdity of the enormous area allotted to the individual netter. Our latest authority, Westberg, computes that the parasang was equal to 3 miles 1335 yards, or about 37⁄10 miles Klio, xiv. 338 ff.).[1043]
Let us now see how this parasang possession works out on Lake Tiberias, the only sheet of water where netting widely prevailed.
Its extreme length is about thirteen miles: its greatest width less than seven. Allowing for sinuosities of coast line, let us concede fifty miles in circumference. This extent of shore, if the area of a parasang is possessed on only one side of the netter, would suffice for 13½ netters, or, if on both sides, for 6¾ netters, i.e. a monopoly on the most prolific water, which, in Euclidian parlance, “is absurd.”
If we disregard the words “set up a net on a bank,” and allow that the parasang possession holds merely for the surface area, we are immediately confronted by two different questions.
First, does this allotted space spread from the boat by a parasang only North, or by a parasang only South, etc? Second, if not, but extends for a circumference of which the boat is the centre, how is the possessory area to be measured, known, or shown? Oppian, it is true, sings with poetical license of “Nets, Which like a city to the floods descend,” but even he does not vouchsafe to us a picture of netting on such a grandiose scale as seven and a half miles.
Before this area of possession can be definitely established, far weightier authority must be produced than a casual sentence from a commentator, whose very lateness of date is betokened by his employment of the Persian word, parasang.
In dealing with the Talmud, we must always bear in mind that a large part was written as late as between (say) 250 and 550 a.d., and by men dwelling mostly at a distance from the Holy Land, who not infrequently show themselves unfamiliar with or ignoring the conditions of the earlier days.
In early times, possibly because of the small coast-line and poor harbours which Palestine possessed on the Mediterranean, little or no reference to fishing on the coast crops up. Later, a considerable trade in fish, salted or pickled, was carried on by the Syrians (some writers even claim a monopoly in such fish for the Phœnicians) at Jerusalem,[1044] where undoubtedly in the northern part of the city a market gave its name to the neighbouring Fish-Gate.
Perhaps to avoid a similar monopoly, definite and strictly enforced prices were periodically fixed by the authorities of the town of Tiberias. By the time of Our Lord thriving fisheries had grown up on the coast, especially in the neighbourhood of Acre, so thriving indeed that the equivalent (in later Hebrew) for “carrying coals to Newcastle” or γλαῦκ’ Ἀθήναζε, became “taking fish to Acco.” On the Sea of Galilee in especial did the industry prosper; one town seems to have been built up by—it certainly derived its name, Taricheæ—from the trade of salting fish.
Four ways of preparing fish were according to custom[1045] pickled, roasted, baked, or boiled; with the latter, eggs were permissible.
The absence of vivaria till a very late period presents another instance of the lack in the ancient of the alertness so typical of the modern Jew. It is hard to deduce why Israel neglected to borrow from Egypt an institution yielding so valuable and lucrative a supply of food. If the spirit of sport, which was one of the attractions of these ponds to the Egyptian gentry, did not appeal in Palestine, the advantages of a ready store, during the hot weather, of fresh fish would surely have been obvious to and eagerly utilised by a race whose passionate plaint was for “a plenty of fish.”
Their great Eastern neighbour inculcated the same object lesson. Most Assyrian towns and temples possessed an artificial or semi-artificial piscina. Yet not till some 1600 years after the Exodus do we glean in the Talmudic term bibar (an attempt at transliteration of the Roman word, vivaria, which of itself betokens the lateness of the effort) the first indication of their employment by the Jews.
This may read as flat heresy, when compared with Isaiah’s words (xix. 10), “And they shall be broken in the purposes thereof, all that make sluices and ponds for fish.” The translation, however, in the R.V. (N.B., there is no word equalling fish in the Hebrew text), “Her pillars shall be broken in pieces, all they that work for hire shall be grieved in soul,” shatters the assertion that vivaria, or fish lakes, were early institutions in Palestine. This shattering is complete, when the only other buttress, the passage in Canticles vii. 4, “Thine eyes (are) like the fish pools in Heshbon,” falls to the ground with the R.V. rendering, “Thine eyes are as the pools of Heshbon.”
If the Israelites, on the one hand, lacked till late the constructive ability of the Romans with regard to vivaria, they, on the other, seem to have lacked or failed to apply the destructive devices employed by the latter for the wholesale slaughter of fish by poison and drugs, made familiar to us by Oppian and Ælian.
Note.—With reference to Mainzer’s absurd contention, Prof. Kennedy writes me as follows: “Naturally the working of the large drag net required considerable elbow-room, and it was understood, as Krauss points out (Talm. Archäol., ii. 145), that a fisherman would not encroach on his neighbour’s ground. If we assume, for the sake of argument, that the ancient drag was as long as those used by the Galilean fishermen of to-day—i.e. about 400 metres (437 yards) according to Masterman (op. cit., 40)—a boat’s crew, working from the beach and spreading their drag in a semi-circle, would not monopolise more than 250-280 yards of sea-front, a very different ‘proposition’ from the Talmud’s or Mainzer’s parasang.”
CHAPTER XL
ICHTHYOLATRY IMPROBABLE—FISH NOT IN SACRIFICES OR AUGURIES
Although nothing is said of sacrificial fish, it is possible that Ichthyolatry did prevail in Israel to some extent. In Deut. iv. 18,[1046] we find an express commandment or law laid down by Moses against the making of a graven image of “the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth”: in Exodus xx. 4, we read, “Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor the likeness of any form that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”
If Ichthyolatry existed, it could hardly have sprung up among a nomad people living in the Desert, as did the Jews for years before they entered the Promised Land. Such a cult with other customs was probably adopted from the Canaanites by their conquerors. Psalm cvi. 35 ff., expressly tells us, “but they mingled themselves with the nations and learned their works; and they served their idols which became a snare unto them.” Any argument in favour of the existence of Ichthyolatry which rests mainly on Deut. iv. 18, and Ex. xx. 4, can to my mind carry little or no weight. They simply embody a comprehensive command against making a graven image of any kind whatever, celestial, terrestrial, or aquatic.
As to the observance of the commandment, Petrie writes:—[1047] “It is often assumed that the prohibition to make a graven image was as rigidly carried out in Israel as in Islam—the second monotheistic revival of the Semites. The holy of holies in Solomon’s Temple contained, however, two enormous cherubim, about 17 feet high, side by side, right across the back of the shrine.... Not only were these figures in the holiest place, but in the court stood the brazen sea on twelve oxen, and figures of lions, oxen, and cherubim covered the tanks. In earlier times Micah had a graven image, and a molten image of silver, weighing about six pounds, in his private chapel of Yahweh, served by a Levite, and they, with the ephod and teraphim, were adopted for tribal worship by part of the tribe of Dan until the captivity.”
The author adds “there was neither officially nor privately any objection to the use of images.” He also shows that even “in the holiest of all things, the Ark of Yahweh, there were cherubs, one on each side of the mercy seat, with their wings covering the mercy seat,” in which design and other religious matters he discerns clear instances of Egyptian influence.
However this may be, it is plain from Ezekiel (viii. 10-11) that the Israelites worshipped graven representations of “every form of creeping things and abominable beasts, and all the idols of the House of Israel, pourtrayed up on the wall round about. And there stood before them seventy men of the elders of Israel ... with every man his censer in his hand: and the odour of the cloud of incense went up.” Some scholars go indeed as far as the assertion that until the prophetic reformation in the seventh and sixth centuries b.c., the popular religion of Israel was about on a level with unreformed Hinduism.
We stand on surer ground in the statement that Ashtoreth, a goddess of the Zidonians and Canaanites, was worshipped by Israel, for in 1 Kings xi. 5 and 33, we read “Solomon went after Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Zidonians,” and, “because they have forsaken me and have worshipped Ashtoreth.”[1048] From this acknowledged worship of Ashtoreth, sometimes identified with Astarte and with Atargatis[1049] —undoubtedly a fish goddess—Ichthyolatry has been claimed for Israel.
ATARGATIS.
From a coin of Hierapolis. See Brit. Mus. Cat. of Coins, Galatia, Pl. 18, 14, or B.V. Head, Historia Numorum2 (Oxford, 1911), p. 777. For Atargatis, see ante, 127.]
But Cheyne, after showing that the mistake of identification arose from Carnaim, where (Maccabees v. 26) the temple of Atargatis stood, being also called (Gen. xiv. 5) Ashtoreth-Carnaim, disputes the deduction, and denies that these goddesses were one and the same. He points out that at Ascalon there were two separate temples, one to Astarte (Ashtoreth) and one to Atargatis (Derceto), standing side by side.[1050]
Strabo, however, states (XVI. p. 748) that in Hierapolis, or Bambyce, or Magog, “there was worshipped the Syrian goddess Atargatis,” and on p. 785 that this same goddess is called by the historian Ctesias Derceto, and by others Athara. In Strabo’s day apparently the name, if not the cult, of Atargatis and Ashtoreth were considered identical.[1051]
Milton, at any rate, evinces no doubt,
“Came Ashtoreth, whom the Phœnicians called Astarte, queen of heaven, with crescent horns: In Sion also not unsung, where stood Her temple on the offensive Mount.”[1052]
The origin, the nature, and the worship of Dagon, the fish god of the Philistines, whose temple stood at Ashdod,[1053] are discussed in Chapter xxxiii.
The Scape-Goat is perhaps the best known of the Israelitish offerings to the deity. The annual ceremony of “the driving away” became a service of the highest pomp and solemnity. For it two goats were necessary: the first to be drawn by lot was killed as a Sin Offering unto Yahweh, the second, the Scape-Goat, after being laden by the High Priest with all the sins of the people for the past year, was sent away into the wilderness, “to Azazel” (Levit. xvi. 8, 10, R.V.).
This symbolic bearing away of the sins of the people is somewhat analogous to that in Lev. xiv. 4 ff., where for the purification of the leper one bird is killed, and the other, charged with the disease, let loose in the open field. In Zech. v. 5 ff., Wickedness is carried away bodily into the land of Shinar.
The resemblance of this periodic offering[1054] and of many other Jewish institutions to those of Babylon is striking. The letting loose and driving away of the Mashhulduppu, or Scape-Goat, was similarly the occasion of an annual ceremony of imposing ritual. The first account of this appears in an inscription of the Cassite period, which avows itself merely a copy of an earlier record, the original of which may well have existed in the time of Hammurabi.
To fish figuring as symbolical bearers away of sins we have references, according to Pitra,[1055] in the Talmud, though not in the Bible. On New Year’s Day (about mid-September), when in the fulness of time God will judge mankind, it was the custom (based on Micah vii., “Thou wilt cast all their sins into the sea”) to assemble near some lake or stream. If goodly numbers of fish were spied, the omen of the expiation of human sins was accepted. Forthwith the crowd jumped for joy, and shed their garments, likewise their sins, on to the fishes, who swam away, heavily laden.
Religious customs in Israel and Assyria both correspond and differ. Thus the sacrifices of fish found in Assyria are absent in Israel, although we read passim of offerings of domestic animals, of wine, of pigeons, and of doves. The former (despite Sayce and Jastrow) were guiltless of human sacrifices, the latter “sacrificed their sons and their daughters” (even) “unto demons.”[1056]
From the words of Exod. xiii. 2, and Numbers xviii. 15 f., Mr. Campbell Thompson holds that the God of Israel plainly regarded the firstborn of men and the firstlings of animals as his own. The Israelites certainly offered up some of their children, generally the firstborn (cf. Isaac), either as a tribute regularly due to their Deity or to appease his anger at times of calamity or danger.[1057] Other writers disavow a general sacrificing of the firstborn as part of the religion of Israel; they attribute individual instances occurring towards the close of the monarchy to the influence of surrounding nations.[1058]
I have come across no counterpart to the Babylonian or Roman custom of taking auguries or making oracular responses from the movements, etc., of fish. If the Hebrews apparently lacked some modes of divining which were employed by the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, etc., such as observation of the flight and cries of birds, the movements of fish, the inspection of the entrails of animals (for it was a King of Babylon, not of Israel, who “looked in the liver”), the Bible reveals signs and omens resembling or identical with those in use elsewhere.
We read, for instance, of Rhabdomancy, or divination by rods, “my people asketh counsel at their stock, and their staff declareth unto them.”[1059] Drawing of Lots, probably by different coloured stones,[1060] Astrology,[1061] and Oneiromancy, or dream divination.[1062]
Strabo reports as attached to the Temple at Jerusalem a class of official dreamers, apparently for purposes of divination or prophetic deliverances. Of the important part played by dreams in both the Old and New Testaments, those of Jacob, Joseph, Solomon, and Joseph the husband of Mary, are inter alia evidence. In the Temple institution[1063] may possibly be detected the continuance of the Semitic pre-Mosaic custom of sleeping places before a temple (as at Serabīt-al-Khādim) for dreamers[1064] in quest of omens, although the references to it in the O.T. itself are very slight, and only occur in connection with Bethel stones and Seers.[1065]
The Seers were a recognised class of persons, who by an exceptional gift could disclose to inquirers secrets of the present and immediate future (1 Sam. ix. 6, and x. 2-6). Samuel himself belonged to the college or class of Seers. Like the diviners, they received fees; thus Saul’s servant suggests the giving to the Seer, whose words invariably come to pass, “a quarter of a shekel of silver.”
As regards the diviners, etc., we find in Isaiah ii. 6, “Thou hast forsaken thy people the house of Jacob, because they be filled with customs from the East and are soothsayers like the Philistines,” and in Deut. xviii. 10-12, “one that useth divination, or practiseth augury, or an enchanter, or a sorcerer, or a charmer, or a consulter with a familiar spirit, or a wizard, or a necromancer,” all these are abominations unto the Lord.[1066]
CHAPTER XLI
THE FISH OF TOBIAS—DEMONIC POSSESSION
The fish in Tobit, apart from its ichthyic, possesses two other points of interest, its magical and its medical power. As in Assyria we have found beliefs in magical charms very prevalent, and exorcisms of demons or devils accomplished by various methods, so with the Jews, especially with the Babylonian Jews, the interest in magical charms was very strong, and the means employed for exorcism very similar.
In both nations it is necessary to have some object into which the spirit may be attracted or driven, in point of fact a Leyden jar in which the malign influence may be isolated under control. It is all the same whether the devils are sent into the Gadarene swine or the jinni corked up in the brass bottle of Solomon. The disease (or oppressing devil) must be gently or forcibly persuaded to leave the human body and enter the dead animal or waxen figure close at hand, and so be brought into subjection, or by cleansing with water or fumigation (often with a censer) banished, and its possession or persecution of the person made of no effect.[1067]
As nowadays even Macaulay’s schoolboy wots little of the Apocrypha, a short résumé of the book of Tobit seems not amiss.
Tobit has become blind, and fallen on evil days in Nineveh; he bids his son Tobias set forth and fetch a sum of money deposited with Gabael in Media. He chooses as a trustworthy companion Azarias, who turns out to be no other than the angel Raphael, whom God, compassionating both Tobit’s plight and Sara’s subjection to a demon, has sent purposely from heaven.
On the journey Tobias (R.V.) “went down to wash himself in the Tigris and a fish leaped out of the river and would have swallowed him. But the angel said unto him, ‘Take hold on the fish.’” And the young man caught hold of the fish and cast it on the land. The angel bids him, “Cut the fish open, and take the heart, the liver, and the gall, and put them up safely,” giving as his reasons, “touching the heart and liver, if a devil or evil spirit trouble any, we must make a smoke thereof before the man or woman, and the party shall be no more vexed. As for the gall, it is good to anoint a man that hath white films in his eyes, and he shall be healed.” Of the healing of his father’s blindness we read later in xi. 11-13, where Tobias “strake of the gall on his father’s eyes.”
The great act of the drama, however, is staged in Ecbatana, where the travellers break their journey at the house of a kinsman Raguel, whose daughter Sara “had been given in marriage to seven husbands, but Asmodeus the evil spirit (or demon) slew them before they had lain with her.” Tobias, not to be daunted, marries Sara, not, however, before Raguel “took paper and did write an instrument of covenant (or marriage contract) and sealed it.”
“And when they had finished their supper, they brought Tobias in unto her. But as he went he remembered the words of Raphael, and took the ashes of the incense, and put the heart and the liver of the fish thereupon, and made a smoke therewith. But when the devil had smelled the smell he fled into the uppermost parts of Egypt, and the angel bound him” (viii. 1, 2, 3). Cf. Milton, P.L. iv. “Asmodeus of the fishy fume,” etc.
Dr. Gaster has given us a version, hitherto unpublished, in which “Tobiyah took the heart of a fish and put it in a censer and burnt it under the clothes of Sarah. And Ashmedai (the demon) received the smells and fled instantly.” This contra-demonical property in a fish appears elsewhere, e.g. in the Macedonian charm, which prescribes for one possessed the wearing of and the fumigation with the glands of a fish, to ensure that “the demons will flee from him.”
The jealous passion of demons or devils for maidens colours Asian, African, and European folk-lores. They lie in wait for married couples; sternly guard their so-called brides.[1068] Otherwise they were usually innocuous. Tobias argues with the angel, “If I go in unto her, I die as the others before: for a wicked spirit loveth her, which hurteth nobody, but those that come in unto her” (vi. 14).
According to the Testament of Solomon, Asmodeus (the demon) avows, “my business is to plot against the newly wedded, so that they may not know one another. I sever them by many calamities, and I waste away the beauty of virgin women.” In Asmodeus we recognise a male counterpart of Lilith and her dangerous relations with men. The demon, in fact, regards the virgin as his own, himself as her true and constant lover, and resents, prevents, or “avenges any infringement of his jus primæ noctis.”[1069]
The misconception, evident in the last eight words of this learned writer, as to what constituted the jus primæ noctis prevails widely. As the jus is the child, strange as the parentage may appear, of the tale of Tobias and Sara, it seems worth our while to notice the strangely erroneous views held both as to the possessor of the jus and the occasion of its exercise, and shortly to explain, even at the risk of seeming to stray from fishing into folklore, the origin and the establishment of the custom.
According to popular belief the superior or lord of the fee, among other feudal privileges, possessed, as such, the vested right of connection with the daughters of his tenantry or of holders of land under him on the first night of their marriages. Some writers on the French Revolution, indeed, indignantly class the wide and brutal exercise of this right on chaste maidens by licentious seigneurs as not the least, perhaps one of the most provocative, of the social causes, which led to the detestation and subsequent massacre of the noblesse in many départements and to the overthrow of the old landed system!
But alas! “this sad old romance, this unchivalrous story” (to vary Lucille) must go to the wall. The jus, as thus conceived and described, never in fact existed anywhere in civilised Europe. The figment of its ruthless exercise as a legal right by licentious lordlings owes its existence to a vivid imagination uninfected by one germ of truth, as Lord Hailes, M. L. Veuillot, and others clearly demonstrate.[1070]
It must come as a severe shock to preconceived ideas to run up against the dull facts of history, and thence discover that the jus primæ noctis, so far from being the barbarous privilege of deflowering an unwilling bride, was merely a right accorded by the Church to the husband on the payment of a varying fee to the bishops, etc., for the privilege of disregarding the ecclesiastical ordinance, which required that his bride should remain in a state of virginity for one, two, or three days![1071]
Continence for one night was first enjoined in the decree passed by the Fourth Council of Carthage in 398 a.d.[1072] This, extended to “two or three days,” figured not only in the Capitularies of Charlemagne,[1073] but was received into the Canon Law, and was twice repeated in the decretals of the Catholic Church.[1074]
But what, it may be fairly asked, has the jus primæ noctis got to do with our Tobias and Sara? The history of the connection deserves tracing, not only to clear away its obscurity, but also to show how a custom—important in result but based simply on a variant version of Tobit—was by the Church early adopted and widely inculcated. The days, during which the continence enjoined on the newly married could only be disregarded if the husband had previously paid for the privilege a fee to some religious authority, came to be known as “Tobias Days.”
No searching, however diligent, of the Septuagint or of our A. or R. Versions, nor (it seems) of the Aramaic text of the tale of Tobit sheds light on the origin of the custom or of the application of the name.
The Vulgate, however, which the Roman Church adopts, sets forth the story of the abstinence of Tobias from Sara. “Then Tobias exhorted the virgin, and said unto her: Sara, arise, and let us pray to God to-day, and to-morrow, and the next day: because for these three nights we are joined to God: and when the third night is over we will be in our wedlock. For we are the children of the Saints, and we must not be joined together like the heathen who know not God.”[1075]
From this (apparently) solitary and quite different version sprang the custom of the “Tobias Days,” and the jus primæ noctis, of which the usual conception is “a monstrous fable born of ignorance, prejudice, and confusion of ideas.”[1076]
The custom of continence for varying periods probably springs from the common widespread belief (of which Tobit affords a Semitic example) that demons lie in wait to harm newly-married couples, and from the hope that if allowed free scope for making love to the bride their jealous wrath might be appeased, or the danger, at any rate, minimised. The alternative to appeasement was deception of the demon; whence women sometimes disguised themselves as men, and even wore false beards!
We find, on returning from this semi-folklore excursion, Prof. Langdon asserting that in Sumero-Babylonian religion each individual is guarded by a divine spirit or god.[1077] He is called the “Man’s God,” and the man is defined, in a religious sense, as a “Son of God.” But this term applies to no females.
This can hardly be attributed to accident, for our sources of information mention hundreds, even thousands, of men bewitched, and by demonic force abandoned by their indwelling gods, but never a woman. Women not infrequently figure as causing the condition of tabu, but never as having fallen to the powers of devils, or witches, or as being under the protection of a personal god. They never appear in the private penitential psalms.
But when we recall the high position occupied by women, not only in Babylonian society, but also in the eye of the civil law, which regarded their rights, as often as not, equal to those of men, and that women are often found as priestesses of religious orders, Langdon’s statements, resting on recent discoveries, create grounds for surprise.
To explain the anomaly he conjectures that when the texts refer to sinners, penitents, or sufferers, the title “son of his god” applies in all probability also to women.
The book of Tobit, whether Persian in its source or Aramaic in its original text, furnishes an example of demonic possession of a woman, a Hebrew of the Hebrews.
The Jewish conception of demonic possession resembles, indeed probably descends from, the Babylonian. The “seven devils” of Matt. xii. 45, Luke xi. 26, and viii. 2, simply reflect the evil spirits, called in a famous incantation The Seven, who play no small part in Babylonian mythology.[1078]
The N.T. confines the instances of evil spirits possessing mankind—more frequently in the psychical rather than in the physical sense—to the Gospels and the Acts, which illustrate demonic possession of women by (inter alias) the Canaanitish woman (Matt. xvi. 22) and Mary Magdalene, “from whom seven devils had gone out” (Luke viii. 2).[1079]
CHAPTER XLII
THE FISH OF MOSES—JONAH—SOLOMON’S RING
The many versions of “the fish of Moses” are but delightful explanations of the flat fish having more meat on one side than another, or being white or colourless on one side and darkish coloured on the other.
In one story the Almighty, annoyed with Moses for answering some one’s query “Who was the most knowing of men?” with a simple “I,” instead of accrediting his wisdom to God, revealed unto him, “verily, I have a servant at a place where the two seas meet, and he is more knowing than thou.” The legend, with the direction to Moses to take a fish and put it in a measure, and the fish’s escape by God’s aid, etc., is too well known for recital.
But the conclusion of Hamid of Andalusia as to the nature of the fish is not, and may be added. “The fish of Moses which I saw in the Mediterranean is of the breed of that fried fish, a half of which Moses and Joshua ate, and the other half God revived. It is about a span long. On one side it has bristles and its belly is covered with a thin skin. It has but one eye and half a head. Looking at it on one side you would deem it dead, but the other side is perfect in all its parts.”[1080]
To account for the difference in colour the legend of the Arabs[1081] runs thuswise:—“Moses was once cooking a fish, and when it had been broiled till it was brown on one side, the fire or oil gave out, and Moses angrily threw the fish into the sea, when, although it had been half broiled, it came to life again, and its descendants have ever since preserved the same peculiarities of colour.”
The half-destroyed fish which recovers life meets us also in the belief which unto this day lingers in some towns on the Black Sea, but on the Rhombus, not on the Sole, is the miracle wrought.
According to a Russian legend, the tidings of the Resurrection were brought to the Virgin Mary, when at food: incredulous and as one of little faith she flung the uneaten half of a Rhombus into the water, bidding it, were the message true, come back to life whole! And lo! this it instantly did.
Pictures of the Virgin, commemorating the incident are painted on a Rhombus, nailed to a board, thoroughly dried, and ornamented with a background of gold. A great ceremonial marks their removal to a shrine hermetically sealed. The custom, no doubt, sprang from the belief that fishing enjoyed the special protection of the Holy Mother.[1082]
JONAH ENTERING
THE WHALE’S MOUTH.
From a 14th Century MS.
in H. Schmidt, Jona,
p. 94, fig. 16.
Mahometan tradition abounds with fish lore of the oddest kind. The commentators of the Koran vie, indeed, with the Talmudists in the curious subjects to which they often devote serious study, and in their grotesqueness of invention. The learned Rabbi el Bassam seems to have spent fifteen whole years in the vain endeavour to discover the name of the chef who made the pottage for Esau!
The story of the fishes, who made a point of coming every Saturday morning to tempt the Hebrews to the sin of catching them illustrates Koranic invention. Thinking to avoid the sin and yet secure their seducers, the sojourners went out, dammed the channels, and ate the fish on the next day. But as there was, and in some parts of Scotland still is, little difference as regards working on the Sabbath between fishing and damming, the violation of the day—the punishment scarcely fits the crime—involved their metamorphosis into apes![1083]
The Koran denies to the faithful on pilgrimage any hunting of game en route, but allows fishing and eating of fish from the sea.[1084] At first, eating of fish was apparently unlawful, because the name of Allah could not always be pronounced over them before they died.
To remedy this enforced abstinence from such a wealth of healthy food Mahomet blessed a knife and cast it into the sea, thus all fish were blessed and had their throats cut before they were brought to shore. “The large openings behind the gills are of course the wounds thus miraculously made without killing the fish!”[1085]
We discover in another legend that an accidental act on the part of Abraham—not a designed ceremony on the part of Mahomet—gave Mussulmans their liberty of ichthyophagy. The patriarch, after sacrificing the ram instead of Isaac, threw the knife into a stream and incidentally struck a fish, whence fishes are the only animals eaten by Mahometans without their throats being previously cut.
The place of fish in the Zodiac has been already noticed. Apparently the position of the Pisces led Kepler to believe that he had discovered the means of determining the true year of our Saviour’s birth. From the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn and Mars in 1604, the astronomer working backward found that Jupiter and Saturn were in the constellation of the Pisces (a fish, be it noted, being the astrological symbol for Judæa) in the latter half of the year of Rome 747, and were joined by Mars in 748. Their first union in the East awoke the attention of the Magi, told them that the expected time had come, and bade them set forth for Judæa.
Astronomy has been to archæology a most helpful hand-maiden in establishing not only this but other dates of ancient, especially of Assyrian, history.[1086]
If the surmise of Isaak Walton[1087] that Seth, the son of Adam, taught his son to cast a line, and engraved the mystery of the craft on those pillars of which Masons are supposed to know so much, or even if the statement that,
“Deucalion did first this art invent Of Angling, and his people taught the same,”
could have been verified, how many discussions on the question—formerly almost as hotly combated as some religious doctrine—as to what was the first method of fishing would have been avoided. Alas! an authoritative answer is even yet to seek.
The nature of the “great fish” of Jonah will, I fear, no longer prove an attractive subject for sermons. Identification of “the beast” ranging through all the fishes of Ichthyology, from the celebrated “first, aiblins it was a whale,” down to “nineteenthly” (whose precise species I forget), will alas! with the development of the higher criticism and of comparative mythology hardly draw the tensely interested congregations of yore.
Tylor points out that at the root of the apologue of Jonah lies the widely-spread Nature-myth of the sea-monster or dragon, of which the fight between Tiāmat and Marduk, and of Andromeda and the sea-monster are analogous developments.[1088]
JONAH LEAVING
THE WHALE’S MOUTH.
From a 14th Century MS.
in H. Schmidt, Jona,
p. 94, fig. 17.
The picture shows that while the whale’s gastric juices had completely absorbed Jonah’s clothes and curls, they prevailed not, possibly from callosity of hide, against his body.]
Cheyne detects the link between the original myth and the story of Jonah in Jeremiah li. 34, “he hath swallowed me up as a dragon: he hath filled his maw with my delicates: he hath cast me out,” and again in verse 44, “and I will bring forth out of his mouth that which he has swallowed up.”
Allusions to mythical dragons occur elsewhere, as in Psalm lxxiv. 13, “Thou breakest the heads of the dragons (or sea-monsters) in the water.” The curious belief in a dragon or fish that swallows the moon spreads wide. This draws from Mr. R. C. Thompson[1089] the comment, “when it is remembered that Jonah was swallowed by the ‘great fish’ for three days (the period of the moon’s disappearance at the end of the month), the coincidence is well worth considering; especially as Jonah is the Hebrew word for dove, and it was at Harrān, the city sacred to the Moon God, that the dove was sacrificed (Al. Nadim, 294).”
But whatever the “great fish,” and whatever the story’s derivation, the whimsical treatment of the prophet’s imprisonment in a poem by the Rev. Zachary Boyd, Rector of Glasgow University in the seventeenth century, demands some quotation:—
“What house is this? here’s neither coal nor candle; Where I no thing but guts of fishes handle; The like of this on earth man never saw, A living man within a monster’s mawe!”
He then goes on to contrast Noah’s freedom of movement in the ark with his enforced immobility:
“He and his ark might goe and also come, But I sit still in such a straitened roome, As is most uncouth, head and feet together Among such grease as would a thousand smother; I find no way now for my shrinking hence, But here to byde and die for mine offence; Eight persons were in Noah’s hulk together, Comfortable they were each one to other. In all the earth like unto me is none Farre from all living I heere byde alone, Where I, entombed in melancholy sink, Choakt, suffocat, with excremental stink.”[1090]
I close this, as my other chapters, with a legend which makes fish directly or indirectly responsible for some historical happening.
It was through a fish (according to the Talmud) that Solomon regained his kingdom. The King one day, while bathing, confided his signet ring to one of his many concubines, Amina. Was it her eyes, I wonder, or those of that Queen, Pharaonic or other (by whose happy influence Solomon, eschewing evil and cleaving only unto her, was perhaps inspired to write The Song of Songs), which he likens to the pools of Hesbon?
A devil named Sakhar, the Talmud goes on, coming in the shape of Solomon, obtained the ring from Amina, and by virtue of its possession sat on the throne in Solomon’s guise. After forty days the devil flew away, and threw the ring into the sea. The signet was immediately swallowed by a fish, which on being caught was given to Solomon. The ring was found in its stomach, and he, who without its credentials had been compelled to beg for bread and from his appearance being changed by the devil had been regarded as a preposterous pretender, “by this means recovered his kingdom, and taking Sakhar and tying a great stone to his neck, threw him into the sea of Tiberias.”[1091]
In another version[1092] —very probable because more characteristic of Solomon, in that he annexes another wife—the King after the loss of his throne became a cook in the palace of a foreign sovereign, married his master’s daughter, bought a fish with the ring inside, and so recovered his realm.
In another legend fish play, if not a historical, yet no small part in connection with a famous historical character.
St. Brandan in his travels encountered Judas Iscariot, whose allotted punishments at any rate lacked not monotony, for after each spell of pitch and sulphur he was condemned to sit on a desolate rock in the frozen regions. To the query as to the purpose of a cloth bandage worn round the head, Judas made answer that it was an effectual charm against the ferocious fishes among which he was often doomed to be thrown, for at its sight they lost their will to bite. He had obtained this shield because on earth he had once given a piece of cloth to a naked beggar, and so, even unto him, a deed of charity was not allowed by the Almighty to pass without reward.[1093]
When, in Matthew Arnold’s poem, “St. Brandan sails the northern main” and comes across Judas on an iceberg, the fishes occur not, but the cloth appears:
“And in the street a leper sate Shivering with fever, naked, old; Sand raked his sores from heel to pate, The hot wind fevered him five-fold.
He gazed upon me as I passed And murmur’d: Help me or I die!— To the poor wretch my cloak I cast, Saw him look eased, and hurried by.”
For which act of charity Judas was permitted by the angel every Christmas night to
“Go hence and cool thyself an hour.”
CHINESE FISHING
CHINESE ANGLING.
From Tū Shu Chi Ch’êng, XVII, Pl. 16.