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]