326 ABSTENTION FROM FISH 



various sorts of fish, one enclosed in a royal cartouche ^ and at 

 the same place a Ptolemaic-Roman cemetery, containing great 

 numbers of Lates, mummified by art or Nature, 2 and when 

 further we find at Gurob, near the old Moeris Canal, cemeteries 

 of the same fish unassociated with human remains, and dating 

 from the XVIIIth or XlXth Dynasty, when we find all these,^ 

 we are driven, as was the negro when faced with another, but 

 logical, dilemma, to " purtend brains, at any rate scrat heads." 



Nor is our " purtending or scratting " ended, when attempts, 

 based on the finding in the fish cemetery at Gurob of a small 

 head of a goddess, are made to connect the Athena of Strabo 

 with Hathor, to whom Keller ^ alleges that the Oxyrhynchus 

 (often found embalmed at Thebes) was sacred. So, again, 

 our clarity of ideas is not increased, when we read that Hat- 

 mehyt was the patron goddess of Mendes, the capital of the 

 XVI Nome (which of all the Nomes alone possessed a fish for 

 its emblem) and that this fish is regularly represented above 

 the head of Hat-mehyt. 



But one fact stands out as adverse to the identification of 

 any god as a god of fish or connected with fishing. In the 

 magico-religious welter of god-creating and god-adopting 

 characteristic of the later Egyptians, who locally worshipped 

 beasts, birds, reptiles, and insects, the first commandment 

 given to Israel was faithfully observed, in that they made not 

 unto themselves a graven or other image of any deity " of the 

 likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth." ^ 



1 Wilkinson, op. cit., III. 343, f. 5S6. 



2 See Proc. Soc. Biblical Archcsology, XXI. p. 82, for a picture of a bronze 

 mummy-case containing remains of a small Lates. 



' L. Loat, Saqqara Mastahas, I. Gurob. Plates 7, 8, g, and Petrie and Currelly, 

 Ehnasya, 1905, p. 35. 



* Op. cit., p. 346. 



* See Bates, p. 234, ff. 



