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.