OF ALL COUNTRIES. 471 



CHAPTER II. . 



EGYPT AND THE ICHTHYOPHAGI. 



She was used to take delight, with her fair hand 

 To angle in the Nile. 



Beaumont and Fletcher. 



EGYPT, the China of the Western world, was the cradle of 

 piscatorial as of other industrial arts and inventions. So 

 prominent a part was played by the fishermen in the 

 domestic economy of that country that the prophet Isaiah 

 alludes in special terms to their desolation. In the sepul- 

 chral monuments of that extraordinary land where the 

 living have the appearance of being already dead, and the 

 dead vociferously claim to be considered alive, we find 

 many allusions to the practice and illustrations of the 

 methods pursued. Drag-nets and clap-nets are constantly 

 represented full of fish, and bronze harpoons and fish-hooks 

 still remain to bear witness to their early ingenuity. The 

 tomb of Nevophth, built as early as the seventeenth dynasty, 

 contains a representation of two men angling, with the hiero- 

 glyph of fishing inscribed above them. Another picture of 

 about the same period shows five men engaged in net-casting : 

 one standing in the water, and the other standing in the 

 middle of the net. At Elethyia in a similar painting, ropes 

 are attached to each extremity. One of the hieroglyphs 

 collected and conjecturally translated by the learned and 



