How did the earliest fisherman secure his prey? Was it by means of the Spear, under which term I include harpoons and barbed fishing spears of any kind, the Net, or the Line? None of these has lacked its champions, of whom the Line has attracted the fewest, the Spear the most.
Uncertainty as to the order of precedence was not really remarkable. We lacked even as late as the beginning of the last century both the data as to Egyptian and Assyrian fishing, which the discovery of the key to the hieroglyphs by Champollion and to the cuneiform by Rawlinson has laid bare, and the data as to the fishing of the Troglodytes which scientific examination of the caves of France and Spain has revealed.
The outlook of our forefathers was necessarily limited, indeed monotopical. No big maps of the archæological world widened their vision. Some sectional sketches, and these badly charted, obscured their perspective.
The priority of the Net at one time probably enrolled the majority of adherents. Nor can we wonder, when we realise that in the case of a country so ancient as India we light on no method of fishing other than Netting—and even that till the post-Vedic literature after 200 b.c. most rarely—in Sanskrit or Pāli literature before 400 a.d.[1] Hence came the deduction, not unnatural but illogical, since it stresses too strongly the argument of silence or omission—i.e. because no specimen or representation of a thing exists the thing itself never existed—that the Net must have been the first implement.
And even now after many years of exploration in Mesopotamia a champion of the Net or of the Line, if he similarly disregarded logic and all save Assyrian remains, might not unreasonably proclaim their antecedence to the Spear, of which no mention or representation as a method of fishing has yet been unearthed.
In the case of Egypt the advocate either of the Spear or Net has not as strong, certainly not so clear, a case. Although examples of the first have been discovered in prehistoric graves, the Net finds representation earlier than the Spear. Be this how it may, the Spear, Net, Line, Rod flourish synchronously in the XIIth Dynasty c. 2000, or according to Petrie’s chronology about 3500 b.c.
In China, unless the sentence of the quite modern I shih chi shih, that in the reign of the legendary Emperor who first taught the use of fire, “fishermen used the silk of the cocoons for their lines, a piece of sharpened iron for their hooks, thorn-sticks for their rods, and split grain for their bait,” be potent enough to produce a protagonist for the priority of the Rod, the boldest advocate would shrink from championing either the Spear or Net. The first mention c. 900 b.c. (I know of none actually written before this date[2]), shows them, and the Rod, in general and simultaneous operation.
From Crete shines out no guiding light. The débris recovered from centres of the ‘Minoan’ civilisation yields frequent and in the main vivid pictures of fish, e.g. those on the Phaistos Disc (which is considered the earliest instance of printing in Europe at any rate) and the flying fish on glazed pottery from Knossos. But unfortunately neither in the Annual Reports of Sir Arthur Evans to the British School at Athens nor (he tells me) in his forthcoming book do modi piscandi obtain notice.
In Greece, a champion of any single method would be sadly to seek. The Spear, the Net, the Line, and the Rod all occur in our earliest authority, Homer, and, curious to note, as a rule in similes. From the fact that the Spear finds mention but once, the Net twice, and the Line (with or without the Rod) thrice, a real enthusiast has deduced an argument for the priority of the last two over the Spear!
This short survey forces the conclusion that we cannot fix definitely which was the method adopted by the earliest historical fishermen.