Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

356 FISHING METHODSbeen acquainted only with the last two, Line and Hook,and Net.Examples of the former method occur in Monuments ofNineveh (ist Series). In Plate 39 B, a man sitting on a terraceby a river is depicted in the act of landing a fish ; in Plate 67 B,a man is wading in a river with what seems to be identical witha creel. The first was excavated, and subsequently re-buriedat Nimroud, the latter (also re-buried) at Koujmnjik. Thesecond picture excites a livelier interest, for two men wellinto their fish are shown in the water astride the inflated skinsof a goat—a method of crossing the Tigris as habitual then asin the present year of our century. 1Despite RawHnson's sentence, " of early Chaldean {i.e.Sumerian) there are found made of bronze materials chains,nails, and fish-hooks," 2 no specimen of a fish-hook, bronzeor other, has been as yet obtained in Mesopotamia. It isimpossible thus to determine whether the hooks were straightlike those recorded by Plutarch, bent Uke those of the Odyssey,or barbed. Cros, however, claims that Lagash excavationsyielded "copper fish hooks." Rev. d'Assyr., vi. 48.Representations also fail to help, probably because a hook,plain and simple, hardly commends itself as a subject forartistic treatment. Nor does the primitive Assyrian sculptor,however distrustful of the imagination of the observer,go asfar as to depict " by conventional device " a hook inside themouth of the fish which is being taken !In the Assyrian language there is apparently no word forfish-hook. From the resemblance between the Hebrew wordhoah, which means both thorn and fish-hook, and the Assyrianword hdhu, which, it is alleged, means thorn, it has been^ We sometimes find with an army crossing a river, as delineated in thesculptures, each soldier with the skin beneath his belly and paddhng with hislegs and arms, but retaining in his mouth one of the legs of the skin, intowhich he blows as into a bagpipe. The act of paddhng across a big river,like the Euphrates, would of itself need all his breath ; but King points outthat the sculptor, in the spirit of primitive art, which, dif&dent of its ownpowers of portrayal or distrusting the imagination of the beholder, seeks tomake its object clear by conventional devices, wishes to indicate that theskins are not solid bodies, and can find no better way of showing it than bymaking his swimmers continue blowing out the skins.* Five Great Monarchies (London, 1862-67), vol. I. p. 99-