50 INTRODUCTION 



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

 le filet ! Very many of the earUest 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 iishing which are contained in the 

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

 The Pancatantra,^ 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 : 3 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 fmding Angling oases 

 in the desert, but when in 



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



I found the word [safffd) 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 inappUcable to ancient methods. ^ 



I have come to the sad conclusion that the Persians ancient 

 and modern care not in general for fishing or angUng, 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 words, which strictly mean 



^ Book I., Story 12 and 15. Book XI., 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 Wilham Jones holds that this collection of Fables " comj)rises all the 

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

 few works of Oriental hterature." 



' No Quatrain of Omar Khayam sings of the craft. 



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



