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.