HAND-LINING—BAITS 315 
province which the tomb’s owner governed, or a peasant fishing 
on his own, is not merely posing for his picture. 
The Theban illustration (some six hundred years later) x 
squares with Wilkinson’s statement ‘‘ sometimes the angler 
posted himself in a shady spot by the water’s edge, and, having 
ordered his servants to spread a mat upon the ground, sat upon 
it as he threw his line: some, with higher ideas of comfort, 
used a chair, as stout gentlemen now do in punts upon retired 
parts of the Thames.” The beat of our piscator, whose fishing 
“tines should be closely studied, was probably not on “ a retired 
part ” of the Nile, but on one of his own vivaria, which, as in 
Assyria and Italy, ensured a supply of fresh fish in hot weather. 
The lengths of the Rod and of the Line, if we may compute 
them by the height of the Anglers, assimilate fairly well to the 
eight cubits or six feet of ASlian’s Macedonian weapon some 
two millennia later. 
Figures of fish caught by the mouth indicate baits, but no 
data enable us to identify their nature. Wilkinson’s state- 
ment ‘‘in all cases they adopted a ground bait, without any 
float’ leaves itself open to question. In the Beni Hasan 
scene of Angling, which he entitles Fishing with Ground Bait, 
neither the hieroglyph attached nor anything else shows that, 
although in this instance no float appears, the bait was resting 
at the bottom, and not moving in the stream. The tombs 
generally may have led him to conclude that floats were 
unknown, but a netting scene in the Tomb of Ti shows a large 
float, presumably indicating the exact spot occupied by the 
trap in the water.! 
The ancient Egyptian, if he employed the practice of his 
modern successor, used scraps of meat, lumps of dough, 
minnows, and bits of fish.2 In connection with the last two 
a very curious passage in the Book of the Dead runs, “‘ I have 
not caught fish with bait made of fish of their kind.” 3 
1 Steindorff, op cit., Pl. 110. Bates, p. 240, holds that “ floats attached 
to Harpoon lines were probably in common use”: the infrequency—to say 
the least of it—of their representation lends but a slender support to his 
suggestion. 
2 Klunziger, Upper Egypt (1878), p. 305, states that the townsfolk hand-lined 
with these baits, but that the fish-eating Bedouins still employed the Spear. 
5 Budge, Trans. Book of the Dead, vol. II. p. 362. 
Y 
