50 INTRODUCTION 
As with India, so with Persia ancient and modern, toujours 
le filet! Very many of the earliest prose works in modern Persian 
came through the Pahlavi from the Sanskrit. Thus the three 
or four stories—occasionally but wrongly regarded as of Persian 
origin—about fish and fishing which are contained in the 
Anwar-t-Suhaili! can be traced to The Fables of Bidpat, or 
The Pancatantra,? translated from the Arabic version into 
Persian about 550 A.D. 
In modern Persian (c. 1000 A.D.) poetry, lines allusive to 
fishing dot themselves sparsely : 3 even in them the Net bulks 
biggest. Hafiz (fourteenth century), however, gives us 
“T have fallen into a Sea of Troubles, (presumably tears), 
So that my Beloved may catch me with a Hook ”’ (a curl of hair). 
A passage in Arabic furnished hope of finding Angling oases 
in the desert, but when in 
“ A fish whose jaw the gaff of Death had pierced,” 
I found the word (saffad) rendered gaff given by Richardson’s 
Persian-Arabic Dictionary as ‘“‘a roasting spit, a poker for the 
fire,’ my hope fled, for I quickly realised here an instance of 
anachronistic translation, or the employment of fishing terms 
appropriate to modern but inapplicable to ancient methods.¢ 
I have come to the sad conclusion that the Persians ancient 
and modern care not in general for fishing or angling, although 
the Gulf, from which the ancient Sumerians garnered such 
splendid “‘ harvest of the sea,’’ washes their shores, and from 
their mountains descend “ fishful”’ streams. I have reached my 
conclusion for the following reasons :— 
(A) There is no word in the language which properly 
expresses fish-hook. Arabic words, which strictly mean 
1 Book I., Story 12 and 15. Book XI., Story 4. Here the fisherman, 
when asked by the king the sex of a fish, saves the situation and collars 
2000 dinar by ejaculating the blessed word, not Mesopotamia, but ‘‘ Herma- 
phrodite,”” which he had once overheard two students casually employ. 
4 Sir William Jones holds that this collection of Fables “‘ comprises all the 
wisdom of Eastern nations, and was surpassed in esteem and popularity by 
few works of Oriental literature.” 
3 No Quatrain of Omar Khayam sings of the craft. 
4 See Idyll XX. of Theocritus, postea 135, note 1, for another example. 
