FISH AND GODS— FISH MUMMIES 325 



Figures (even of food, as I have shown) drawn in the tombs 

 were supposed to retain their original powers. To avoid their 

 contact with the dead by walking into his chamber, figures 

 of human beings, of animals including snakes, of birds, but 

 not of insects, were, at any rate in the Vlth and Xllth 

 Dynasties, frequently mutilated. 1 



A prayer 2 shows how real was the fear : " Let not decay 

 caused by any reptile make an end of me, and let them not 

 come against me in their various forms." The danger to the 

 royal Ka from a fish swimming, or from the fish Clarias macra- 

 canthus walking from its habitat in the Upper Nile into the 

 tomb chapel, beggars description ! 



The apparent anomaly, that while scenes of fishing occur 

 in the tombs as often as those of fowling and hunting, and that 

 while the latter frequently, the former never, figure in the 

 offerings, is (according to Lacau 3) quite easy of explanation. 

 When a man dies, he is identified with and taken to Osiris, to 

 whom, like the other gods, no fish was meet for offerings, 

 whereas the scenes, which depicted them, were representations 

 of what a man had done or known in his lifetime. 



Additional doubts whether the ban against fish-offerings 

 met with exceptions, are caused by the discovery of models 

 of fish buried in the XlXth Dynasty foundation-deposits 

 along with those of fowl, beef, etc.^ Perhaps the modelling 

 differentiates the instance. If fish were neither meet nor 

 permissible offerings to the gods, how came it that some deities 

 were venerated in connection with fish ? 



The evidence of Strabo that the Lates niloticus was at 

 Latopolis,5 a cit}^ named in the fish's honour, revered in con- 

 junction with a goddess whom he terms Athena, may, like that 

 of many another globe-trotter, perhaps, be discounted. 



But when we find in the scattered stones of that temple 



^ Mutilation was not invariable, even in the Xllth Dynasty, as Beni 

 Hasan discloses. 



* In the Book of the Dead, Chapter 154. 



* P. Lacau, Suppressions ei modifications des signes dans les iextes fune- 

 braires, Zeitschrift fiir agyptische Sprache, vol. 51 (1913), 42 ff. 



* Petrie, Six Temples at Thebes (London, 1897), PI. XVI., f. 15, fish from 

 foundation deposit of Taussert, and PI. XVIII., from Siptah. 



' XVII. I, 47. Latopohs is now Esneh. 



