Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

3326 ABSTENTION FROM FISHvarious sorts of fish, one enclosed in a royal cartouche i and atthe same place a Ptolemaic-Roman cemetery, containing greatnumbers of Lates, mummified by art or Nature, 2 and whenfurther we find at Gurob, near the old Moeris Canal, cemeteriesof the same fish unassociated with human remains, and datingfrom the XVIIIth or XlXth Dynasty, when we find all these,we are driven, as was the negro when faced with another, butlogical, dilemma, to " purtend brains, at any rate scrat heads."Nor is our " purtending or scratting " ended, when attempts,based on the finding in the fishcemetery at Gurob of a smallhead of a goddess, are made to connect the Athena of Strabowith Hathor, to whom Keller * alleges that the Oxyrhynchns(often found embalmed at Thebes) was sacred. So, again,not increased, when we read that Hat-our clarity of ideas ismehyt was the patron goddess of Mendes, the capital of theXVI Nome (which of all the Nomes alone possessed a fish forits emblem) and that this fish is regularly represented abovethe head of Hat-mehyt.But one fact stands out as adverse to the identification ofany god as a god of fish or connected with fishing. In themagico-religious welter of god-creating and god-adoptingcharacteristic of the later Egyptians, who locally worshippedbeasts, birds, reptiles, and insects, the first commandmentgiven to Israel was faithfully observed, in that they made notunto themselves a graven or other image of any deity " of thelikeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth." ^1 Wilkinson, op. ciL, III. 343, f. 586.* See Proc. Soc. Biblical Archceology, XXI. p. 82, for a picture of a bronzemummy-case containing remains of a small Lates.^ L. Loat, Saqqara Mastabas, I. Gurob. Plates 7, 8, 9, and Petrie and Currelly,Ehnasya, 1905, p. 35.* Op. cit., p. 346.* See Bates, p. 234, fi.