Fishing from the Earliest Times - William Radcliffe

As with India, so with Persia ancient and modern, toujours le filet! Very many of the earliest prose works in modern Persian came through the Pahlavi from the Sanskrit. Thus the three or four stories—occasionally but wrongly regarded as of Persian origin—about fish and fishing which are contained in the Anwār-i-Suhaili[94] can be traced to The Fables of Bidpai, or The Pancatantra,[95] translated from the Arabic version into Persian about 550 a.d.

In modern Persian (c. 1000 a.d.) poetry, lines allusive to fishing dot themselves sparsely:[96] even in them the Net bulks biggest. Hafiz (fourteenth century), however, gives us

“I have fallen into a Sea of Troubles, (presumably tears), So that my Beloved may catch me with a Hook” (a curl of hair).

A passage in Arabic furnished hope of finding Angling oases in the desert, but when in

“A fish whose jaw the gaff of Death had pierced,”

I found the word (saffūd) rendered gaff given by Richardson’s Persian-Arabic Dictionary as “a roasting spit, a poker for the fire,” my hope fled, for I quickly realised here an instance of anachronistic translation, or the employment of fishing terms appropriate to modern but inapplicable to ancient methods.[97]

I have come to the sad conclusion that the Persians ancient and modern care not in general for fishing or angling, although the Gulf, from which the ancient Sumerians garnered such splendid “harvest of the sea,” washes their shores, and from their mountains descend “fishful” streams. I have reached my conclusion for the following reasons:—

(A) There is no word in the language which properly expresses fish-hook. Arabic words, which strictly mean grappling hooks, have been adopted or adapted. In modern Arabic itself these words are not used for a fish-hook: bâlûgh, a foreign term, prevails.

(B) In Persian, Arabic, and Turkish [98] the expression to fish, literally translated, equals to hunt fish, and generally describes a man who makes his living by netting, and selling fish.