Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

68 HOMER—POSITION OF FISHERMENall praise and admiration.In this our Fish and so our Fishermenhave attained some, if small, constituent status.The period of such attainment cannot be dated, but howand why the status arrived I now try to trace.Authorities differ widely as to whether the (so-called)Greeks, on leaving Central Asia or whatever their Urheimat,estabhshed their firstProper or Asia Minor.lodgements in Europe or Asia, in GreeceE. Curtius maintained that the loniansat any rate, if not all the Greeks, founded their earliest settlementson the coast of Asia Minor, and only later crossed toGreece.This view finds littlefavour among most Homeric scholarsof the present day,i who reverse the theory. They place thefirst settlement of the immigrant Greeks in European Greece,whence by peaceable permeation or otherwise they subsequentlycolonised the coasts of Asia Minor and the Islands.According to Professor K. Schneider 2 the Greeks, whenswarming from their original Aryan hive and estabhshingthemselves on the coast of Asia Minor and in the Islands ofthe .^gean Sea, carried with them and for a long time closely preservedtheir original habits of hfeandHvelihood. Descended fromgenerations of inland dwellers, eaters of the flesh of wild animals,of sheep, etc., they were ignorant of marine fish as a food. Onlywhen the population increased more rapidly than the crops,did they, profiting by their contact with the Phoenicians, towhom in seamanship ^ and, according to some writers, in art •*^ See, however, Hogarth's Ionia and the East, pp. 8, 120. A fish, the Eel,plays an important part in the attempt to determine the original home of theIndo-European family. See S. Feist, Kultur, Ausbreitung tmd Herkunft derIndogermanen (Berlin, 1913), pp. 187, 525.* Der Fischer in der antiken Litteratur (Aachen, 1892).* While the early Greeks learned much with regard to navigation from thePhcEnicians, none of the Homeric nautical terms have been traced to aPhoenician source, as might have been expected in view of the large numberof such terms which the English language has borrowed from the Dutch, suchas ahoy, boom, skipper, sloop, etc. The French has taken from the English,beauprd, cabine, paquebot, etc. Seymour, p. 322.* " The choice of the subjects (in The Shield of Achilles), especially theabsence of mythological subjects, the arrangement of the scenes in concentricbands, and the peculiar technique, all point to oriental, i.e. in the main toPhoenician and Assyrian influence. In these respects the earliest actualGreek work known to us by description, viz. The Chest of Cypselus (c. 700B.C.), consisting of cedar wood, ivory, and gold, and richly adorned (according