WHAT THE FIRST FISHING?—INDIA, EGYPT 5 
Uncertainty as to the order of precedence was not really 
remarkable. We lacked even as late as the beginning of the 
last century both the data as to Egyptian and Assyrian fishing, 
which the discovery of the key to the hieroglyphs by Champollion 
and to the cuneiform by Rawlinson has laid bare, and the data 
as to the fishing of the Troglodytes which scientific examination 
of the caves of France and Spain has revealed. 
The outlook of our forefathers was necessarily limited, 
indeed monotopical. No big maps of the archeological world 
widened their vision. Some sectional sketches, and these 
badly charted, obscured their perspective. 
The priority of the Net at one time probably enrolled the 
majority of adherents. Nor can we wonder, when we realise 
that in the case of a country so ancient as India we light on no 
method of fishing other than Netting—and even that till the 
post-Vedic literature after 200 B.c. most rarely—in Sanskrit 
or Pali literature before 400 A.D.!_ Hence came the deduction, 
not unnatural but illogical, since it stresses too strongly the 
argument of silence or omission—z.e. because no specimen or 
representation of a thing exists the thing itself never existed— 
that the Net must have been the first implement. 
And even now after many years of exploration in Meso- 
potamia a champion of the Net or of the Line, if he similarly 
disregarded Jogic and all save Assyrian remains, might not 
unreasonably proclaim their antecedence to the Spear, of which 
no mention or representation as a method of fishing has yet 
been unearthed. 
In the case of Egypt the advocate either of the Spear or 
Net has not as strong, certainly not so clear, a case. Although 
examples of the first have been discovered in pre-historic 
graves, the Net finds representation earlier than the Spear. 
Be this how it may, the Spear, Net, Line, Rod flourish syn- 
chronously in the XIIth Dynasty c. 2000, or according to 
Petrie’s chronology about 3500 B.C. 
In China, unless the sentence of the quite modern I shih 
chi shih, that in the reign of the legendary Emperor who first 
taught the use of fire, ‘‘ fishermen used the silk of the cocoons 
1 See postea, 48 ff. 
