50 INTRODUCTION 



As with India, so with Persia ancient and modern, toiijours 

 le filet ! Very many of the carhest prose works in modern Persian 

 came through the Pahlavi from the Sanskrit. Thus the three 

 or four stories — occasionally but wrongly regarded as of Persian 

 origin — about fish and fishing which are contained in the 

 Anwar -i-Suhaili ^ can be traced to The Fables of Bidpai, or 

 The Pancaiantra,'^ translated from the Arabic version into 

 Persian about 550 a.d. 



In modern Persian {c. 1000 a.d.) poetry, lines allusive to 

 fishing dot themselves sparsely : ^ even in them the Net bulks 

 biggest. Hafiz (fourteenth century), however, gives us 



" I have fallen into a Sea of Troubles, (presumably tears). 

 So that my Beloved may catch me with a Hook " (a curl of hair). 



A passage in Arabic furnished hope of finding Angling oases 

 in the desert, but when in 



" A fish whose jaw the gaff of Death had pierced," 



I found the word [saffTld) rendered gaff given by Richardson's 

 Persian- Arabic Dictionary as " a roasting spit, a poker for the 

 fire," my hope fled, for I quickly reahsed here an instance of 

 anachronistic translation, or the employment of fishing terms 

 appropriate to modern but inappHcable to ancient methods. ^ 



I have come to the sad conclusion that the Persians ancient 

 and modern care not in general for fishing or angling, although 

 the Gulf, from which the ancient Sumerians garnered such 

 splendid " harvest of the sea," washes their shores, and from 

 their mountains descend " fishful " streams. I have reached my 

 conclusion for the following reasons : — 



(A) There is no word in the language which properly 

 expresses fish-hook. Arabic v/ords, which strictly mean 



^ Book I., Story 12 and 15. Book XL, Story 4. Here the fisherman, 

 when asked by the king the sex of a fish, saves the situation and collars 

 2000 dinar by ejaculating the blessed word, not Mesopotamia, but " Herma- 

 phrodite," which he had once overheard two students casually employ. 



^ Sir WiUiam Jones holds that this collection of Fables " comprises all the 

 wisdom of Eastern nations, and was surpassed in esteem and popularity by 

 few works of Oriental literature." 



' No Quatrain of Omar Khayam sings of the craft. 



* See idyll XX. of Theocritus, postea 135, note i, for another example. 



