Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

—BY KINGS AND PRIESTS—PIANKHI 321prestige—was identical. Where the people abstained, theyate ; where the people ate, they abstained.The Kings as High Priests seem, down to Ptolemaic times,to have eschewed fish absolutely. The Stele of Piankhi, at anyrate, indicates their practice c. 700 B.C. To this Nubianconqueror of Egypt came the petty Kings of the Delta to offersubmission ; but " they, whose legs from fear were as thelegs of women, entered not into the King's house, because theywere unclean and eaters of fish, which is an abomination forthe Court : but King Namlot, he entered, because he waspure, and ate not fish." 1The reason for this insistence by a Nubian lay perhaps inthe fact that Piankhi had as monarch of Egypt just beenaffiliated to the Sun-god, who not only created righteousness,but lived and fed upon it. A curious prayer or semi-threatby one of the dead survives. If he be not allowed to face hisenemy in the great council of the gods, the Sun-god shouldor would come down from Heaven and live on fish in the Nile,while Hapi, the god of the river, should or would ascend toHeaven and feed on righteousness. The granting of hisprayer or the fulfilment of his threat would reverse the wholescheme of creation. 2The word translated by abomination signifies generallysomething dirty. The epithet, if the Deltaic kings resembledthe Deltaic fishermen, is not inappropriate. Many representationsof the XVIIIth and XlXth Dynasties render the latter,in contradistinction to their brothers of the river proper,with scrubby beards, uncouth of aspect and scant of dressa characteristic which Diodorus Siculus notes, when describingtheir habitations as mere cabins of reeds.But in fairness it must be remembered that since nearlyall history and representations reach us from Upper Egypt,these portraits may merely typify the contempt or dislikefelt by the richer and more civihsed Nilotic for his Deltaic^J. H. Breasted, Records of Ancient Egypt (Chicago, 1906-7), vol. IV.,par. 882.* See Hastings' Ency. of Religion and Ethics, vol. X. pp. 796 and 482, andZeitschrifl fur agyptischc Sprache, vol. 49, p, 51 (Leipzig, 191 1).