HAND-LINING— BAITS 3i5 



province which the tomb's owner governed, or a peasant fishing 

 on his own, is not merely posing for his picture. 



The Theban illustration (some six hundred years later) 

 squares with Wilkinson's statement " sometimes the angler 

 posted himself in a shady spot by the water's edge, and, having 

 ordered his servants to spread a mat upon the ground, sat upon 

 it as he threw his line : some, with higher ideas of comfort, 

 used a chair, as stout gentlemen now do in punts upon retired 

 parts of the Thames." The beat of our piscator, whose fishing 

 lines should be closely studied, was probably not on " a retired 

 part " of the Nile, but on one of his own vivaria, which, as in 

 Assyria and Italy, ensured a supply of fresh fish in hot weather. 



The lengths of the Rod and of the Line, if we may compute 

 them by the height of the Anglers, assimilate fairly well to the 

 eight cubits or six feet of ^^lian's Macedonian weapon some 

 two millennia later. 



Figures of fish caught by the mouth indicate baits, but no 

 data enable us to identify their nature. Wilkinson's state- 

 ment " in all cases they adopted a ground bait, without any 

 float " leaves itself open to question. In the Beni Hasan 

 scene of Angling, which he entitles Fishing with Ground Bait, 

 neither the hieroglyph attached nor anything else shows that, 

 although in this instance no float appears, the bait was resting 

 at the bottom, and not moving in the stream. The tombs 

 generally may have led him to conclude that floats were 

 unknown, but a netting scene in the Tomb of Ti shows a large 

 float, presumably indicating the exact spot occupied by the 

 trap in the water, i 



The ancient Egyptian, if he employed the practice of his 

 modern successor, used scraps of meat, lumps of dough, 

 minnows, and bits of fish. 2 In connection with the last two 

 a very curious passage in the Book of the Dead runs, " I have 

 not caught fish with bait made of fish of their kind." 3 



1 Steindorff, op ciL, PI. no. Bates, p. 240, holds that " floats attached 

 to Harpoon Unes were probably in common use " : the infrequency — 'to say 

 the least of it — of their representation lends but a slender support to his 

 suggestion. 



2 Klunziger, Upper Egypt (1878), p. 305, states that the townsfolk hand-lined 

 with these baits, but that the fish-eating Bedouins still employed the Spear. 



8 Budge, Trans. Book of the Dead, vol. II. p. 362. 



