TEA FAN.
CHAPTER II
FANS OF THE ANCIENTS
EGYPT
The word fan, or van, is derived from the Latin vannus, the Roman instrument for winnowing grain. This winnowing-fan, held sacred by all the peoples of the ancient world, together with the fire-fan (bellows), also a sacred instrument, and used by the priestesses of Isis to fan the flame of their altars—these must be accounted amongst the earliest of the ancient and prolific fan-family. To the first named are several references in Holy Writ. Isaiah, xxx. 24, speaks of the oxen and young asses that shall eat clean provender which hath been winnowed with the shovel and with the fan. Jeremiah, xv. 6-7, lamenting the backsliding of Jerusalem, exclaims, ‘I am weary with repenting; and I will fan them with a fan in the gates of the land’; and again in li. 2, ‘Send unto Babylon fanners that shall fan her, and shall empty her land.’
In Matt. iii. 12, and Luke iii. 17, John the Baptist, announcing the coming of ‘one mightier than I’—‘He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire: whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and will gather the wheat into his garner.’
Both these instruments appear on a bas-relief from a tomb at Sakkarah, of the twelfth Pharaonic dynasty, circa B.C. 2366-2266, sixteen hundred years before Isaiah wrote. In this some shepherds are roasting trussed and spitted ducks over fires which are being kept alive by the plaited, wedge-shaped hand-fan; the winnowing-fan appearing in the same picture.