3i6 TACKLE 



Such was the plea by the soul of the dead man not to be 

 punished for what seemingly was a heinous sin. It is hard to 

 discover where the enormity of the crime arises, i As most 

 fishes are cannibals, the bait here presents one of their natural 

 foods. In the case of an artificial bait, which from the fish's 

 point of view amounts to cheating and deception, the punish- 

 ment presumably fitted the crime, for which no prayer could 

 atone, no pardon be possible ! 



Perhaps this conception indirectly caused and still causes 

 the abstention from such lures as the artificial fly, which the 

 native even now generally rejects. The imphed prohibition, 

 if the whole passage be not metaphorical, probably sprang 

 from and is a relic of Totemism, which widely prevailed in 

 early times. 



The Net : the first examples, owing to their more perishable 

 materials, naturally post-date those of the Harpoon and the 

 Hook, but occur in representations far earUer than either. 

 The suggestion that a part of a Net figures in the hieroglyph 

 of the scenes from the Royal Tombs at Abydos ^, and so denotes 

 its appearance in the 1st Dynasty, carries no conviction. 



Close inspection shows the object to be a bag, or piece of 

 cloth. The Net's dehneation by an artist at the end of the 

 Ilird or very beginning of the IVth lies not open to cavil. ^ 



Peculiar importance pertains to this scene, because it is the 

 first portrayal of the Net in Egypt, and possibly the very first 

 representation connected with fishing the whole world over. 

 It, moreover, as an illustration merely of fish, antedates (if 

 avoiding the Scylla of Petrie's and the Charybdis of Albright's 

 chronologies we steer by Lepsius's chart) the famous Sumerian 

 scene of Gilgamesh carrying fish, by some four centuries. * 



The tomb of Zau furnishes one or two representations of 



^ Yet compare the Scriptural prohibition, " Thou shalt not seethe a kid in 

 his mother's milk," which appears to have been one of the commandments 

 included in the earhest Decalogue. Sir J. G. Frazer discusses this curious 

 injunction in Folklore in the Old Testament, vol. III. p. iii ff. 



2 Vol. I. pi. lo, f. II. 



» Petrie, Medum (1892), PI. XI. A good example (Vth Dynasty) of a Net 

 heaped up in a boat is found in N. de G. Davies, Ptahhetep (London, 1901), 

 PL VI., in the right-hand column of the hieroglyphs. 



* See my Assyrian Chapter, p. 368. The Gilgamesh representation dates 

 c. 2800 B.C. 



