356 FISHING METHODS 



been acquainted only with the last two, Line and Hook, 

 and Net. 



Examples of the former method occur in Monuments of 

 Nineveh (ist Series). In Plate 39 B, a man sitting on a terrace 

 by a river is depicted in the act of landing a fish ; in Plate 67 B, 

 a man is wading in a river with what seems to be identical with 

 a creel. The first was excavated, and subsequently re-buried 

 at Nimroud, the latter (also re-buried) at Kouyunjik. The 

 second picture excites a livelier interest, for two men well 

 into their fish are shown in the water astride the inflated skins 

 of a goat — a method of crossing the Tigris as habitual then as 

 in the present year of our century. ^ 



Despite Rawlinson's sentence, " of early Chaldean {i.e. 

 Sumerian) there are found made of bronze materials chains, 

 nails, and fish-hooks," 2 no specimen of a fish-hook, bronze 

 or other, has been as yet obtained in Mesopotamia. It is 

 impossible thus to determine whether the hooks w^ere straight 

 like those recorded by Plutarch, bent like those of the Odyssey, 

 or barbed. Cros, however, claims that Lagash excavations 

 yielded "copper fish hooks." Rev. d'Assyr., vi. 48. 



Representations also fail to help, probably because a hook, 

 plain and simple, hardly commends itself as a subject for 

 artistic treatment. Nor does the primitive Assyrian sculptor, 

 however distrustful of the imagination of the observer, go as 

 far as to depict " by conventional device " a hook inside the 

 mouth of the fish which is being taken ! 



In the Assyrian language there is apparently no word for 

 fish-hook. From the resemblance betw'een the Hebrew word 

 hoah, which means both thorn and fish-hook, and the Assyrian 

 word hdhu, which, it is alleged, means thorn, it has been 



^ We sometimes find with an army crossing a river, as delineated in the 

 sculptures, each soldier with the skin beneath his belly and paddling with his 

 legs and arms, but retaining in his mouth one of the legs of the skin, into 

 which he blows as into a bagpipe. The act of paddling across a big river, 

 like the Euphrates, would of itself need all his breath ; but King points out 

 that the sculptor, in the spirit of primitive art, which, diffident of its own 

 powers of portrayal or distrusting the imagination of the beholder, seeks to 

 make its object clear by conventional devices, wishes to indicate that the 

 skins are not solid bodies, and can find no better way of showing it than by 

 making his swimmers continue blowing out the skins. 



^ Five Great Monarchies (London, 18O2-G7), vol. I. p. 99- 



