How real was the importance attached to fish, and how recognised its value as a food, can be discerned from early Sumerian documents. The excavations of Telloh furnish an elaborate description of the new temple built by Gudea in honour of Ningirsu. We read that with this god went also other deities, such as his musician, his singer, his cultivator of lands, and his guardian of fishponds.[959]
Then, again, among the officials who were deprived of office by Urukagina, on account of the profits illegally secured by farming out the public revenue, we come across the Inspectors of Fisheries. The drastic reforms and the thorough cleansing of the bureaucracy initiated by this monarch sprang from his desire to improve the condition of his poorer subjects, who for years had suffered from the oppression of the rich or the venality of public functionaries. How general and how numerous vivaria had early become shows in the plaint that “if a poor man built himself a fishpond, his fish was taken; he received neither payment nor redress.”
A document of the twenty-first century brings to light further evidence of the economic importance of fish and of the rights of fishing, and what to us modern fishermen is of intenser interest—the first case on record of Poaching!
This occurred in the reign of Samsu-iluna, the successor to the great Hammurabi. The latter’s Code of laws of 287 sections was considered on its discovery some twenty years ago to be a Digest of Babylonian decisions, but the recent finding of a clay tablet, clearly the prototype of the Code, proves its Sumerian origin.
It not only illuminates vividly the social and economic conditions of Babylon, but established for generations the status, the rights, the duties flowing from contracts or arising from injury.
Its scope is curiously wide. It includes, for instance, provisions to meet such rare cases as injuries which resulted in the miscarriage of women. The similarity of enactment in these cases and in divorces demonstrates inter alia how marked was the Code’s influence on the Mosaic legislation some seven centuries later.
Every one of Hammurabi’s subjects could by its help acquire a clearer conception of his individual property. The letter or rescript of Samsu-iluna shows that rights of fishing were acknowledged and enforceable.
The Rescript runs:—
“Unto Sin-idinnam, Kar-Sippar, and the Judges of Sippar say, Thus saith Samsu-iluna. They have reported (unto me) that the ships of the fishermen go down unto the district of Rabīm and to the district of Shakanīm and catch fish. I am therefore sending (unto thee) an official of the Palace Gate. When he shall reach thee, the ships of the fishermen which are in the district of Shakanīm (shalt thou ...[960]) and thou shalt not again send the ships of the fishermen down into the district of Rabīm or the district of Shakanīm.”[961]
This letter confirms what had previously been only surmised, viz. that the inhabitants of certain districts had enjoyed the exclusive right of fishing in their home waters. “It has already been inferred,” King continues, “that the duty of repairing the banks of rivers and canals, and of clearing the waterways, fell upon the owners of property along the banks, and it was no doubt as a compensation for this enforced service (or corvée) that the fishing in these waters was preserved.”