BY KINGS AND PRIESTS— PIANKHI 321 



prestige — was identical. Where the people abstained, they 

 ate ; 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 any 

 rate, indicates their practice c. 700 B.C. To this Nubian 

 conqueror of Egypt came the petty Kings of the Delta to offer 

 submission ; but " they, whose legs from fear were as the 

 legs of women, entered not into the King's house, because they 

 were unclean and eaters of fish, which is an abomination for 

 the Court : but King Namlot, he entered, because he was 

 pure, and ate not fish." 1 



The reason for this insistence by a Nubian lay perhaps in 

 the fact that Piankhi had as monarch of Egypt just been 

 affiliated to the Sun-god, who not only created righteousness, 

 but lived and fed upon it. A curious prayer or semi-threat 

 by one of the dead survives. If he be not allowed to face his 

 enemy in the great council of the gods, the Sun-god should 

 or would come down from Heaven and live on fish in the Nile, 

 while Hapi, the god of the river, should or would ascend to 

 Heaven and feed on righteousness. The granting of his 

 prayer or the fulfilment of his threat would reverse the whole 

 scheme of creation. 2 



The word translated by abomination signifies generally 

 something dirty. The epithet, if the Deltaic kings resembled 

 the Deltaic fishermen, is not inappropriate. Many represen- 

 tations of 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 dress — 

 a characteristic which Diodorus Siculus notes, when describing 

 their habitations as mere cabins of reeds. 



But in fairness it must be remembered that since nearly 

 all history and representations reach us from Upper Egypt, 

 these portraits may merely typify the contempt or disHke 

 felt by the richer and more civilised Nilotic for his Deltaic 



1 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, and 

 Zeiischnft fiir (igypiischc Sprache, vol. 49, p. 51 (Leipzig, 191 1). 



