Even if we grant that the ruling or only passion of this temperament was for fishing “in plenty,” why, we are driven to ask, did both nations condescend to fishing with hand-lines, which are not much more productive than the Rod? If hand-lining was prompted by some instinct of sport, why was Angling, the higher development of this instinct, not also reached?
Of the four implements of Fishing, the Spear, the Rod, the Line and Hook, and the Net, the Assyrians seem to have been acquainted only with the last two, Line and Hook, and Net.
Examples of the former method occur in Monuments of Nineveh (1st Series). In Plate 39B, a man sitting on a terrace by a river is depicted in the act of landing a fish; in Plate 67B, a man is wading in a river with what seems to be identical with a creel. The first was excavated, and subsequently re-buried at Nimroud, the latter (also re-buried) at Kouyunjik. The second picture excites a livelier interest, for two men well into their fish are shown in the water astride the inflated skins of a goat—a method of crossing the Tigris as habitual then as in the present year of our century.[904]
Despite Rawlinson’s sentence, “of early Chaldean (i.e. Sumerian) there are found made of bronze materials chains, nails, and fish-hooks,”[905] no specimen of a fish-hook, bronze or other, has been as yet obtained in Mesopotamia. It is impossible thus to determine whether the hooks were straight like those recorded by Plutarch, bent like those of the Odyssey, or barbed. Cros, however, claims that Lagash excavations yielded “copper fish hooks.” Rev. d’Assyr., vi. 48.
Representations also fail to help, probably because a hook, plain and simple, hardly commends itself as a subject for artistic treatment. Nor does the primitive Assyrian sculptor, however distrustful of the imagination of the observer, go as far as to depict “by conventional device” a hook inside the mouth of the fish which is being taken!
In the Assyrian language there is apparently no word for fish-hook. From the resemblance between the Hebrew word ḥōaḥ, which means both thorn and fish-hook, and the Assyrian word ḥâḥu, which, it is alleged, means thorn, it has been conjectured that in the latter word we have the Assyrian term for fish-hook. Professor S. Langdon, who in a letter to me advances this conjecture, goes even farther—“in fact ḥâḥu is our only direct evidence for the practice of fishing with hook and line in Assyria.”
Basing himself on a similar Hebraic resemblance, he would make the Assyrian ṣinnitān, “two reins,” come from a supposed ṣinnitu, a possible feminine of ṣinnu, which occurs perhaps in the sense of “thorn,” and carry the same meaning as the Hebrew ṣên, which probably equals “thorn,” while its plural ṣinnōth does stand for “fish-hooks.”
He believes that in the word, abarshu, which Esarhaddon employs, “I snatched him (Abdi-Milkuti, King of Sidon) as a fish from the sea,” and again, of a chief of the Lebanon range who had rebelled and fled, “I caught him from the mountains like a bird,” we have evidence of a technical word for pulling or jerking out a fish with a line held in the hand, or perhaps attached to a Rod, because “snatch” would hardly be the appropriate term for the slower action involved in the drawing in of a net.[906]
Whether in the first simile the suggestion is philologically valid is a point for Assyrian scholars to determine. The adequate rendering or explaining of Sumerian words by Assyrian ones is often difficult and doubtful, for while the latter language is a great help to understanding the former, the Assyrian, especially the later Assyrian, equivalent does not entirely correspond to what would be expected from a literal analysis of the Sumerian word. The second simile, I hold, alludes to the Net of the fowler, with which the representations show the Assyrians to have been familiar.
While there may be doubt whether we possess any Assyrian word signifying hooks, there can be none as to their existence and their employment.