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.