316 TACKLE 
Such was the plea by the soul of the dead man not to be 
punished for what seemingly was a heinous sin. It is hard to 
discover where the enormity of the crime arises.! As most 
fishes are cannibals, the bait here presents one of their natural 
foods. In the case of an artificial bait, which from the fish’s 
point of view amounts to cheating and deception, the punish- 
ment presumably fitted the crime, for which no prayer could 
atone, no pardon be possible ! 
Perhaps this conception indirectly caused and still causes 
the abstention from such lures as the artificial fly, which the 
native even now generally rejects. The implied prohibition, 
if the whole passage be not metaphorical, probably sprang 
from and is a relic of Totemism, which widely prevailed in 
early times. 
The Net: the first examples, owing to their more perishable 
materials, naturally post-date those of the Harpoon and the 
Hook, but occur in representations far earlier than either. 
The suggestion that a part of a Net figures in the hieroglyph 
of the scenes from the Royal Tombs at Abydos 2, and so denotes 
its appearance in the Ist Dynasty, carries no conviction. 
Close inspection shows the object to be a bag, or piece of 
cloth. The Net’s delineation by an artist at the end of the 
IlIrd or very beginning of the IVth lies not open to cavil.8 
Peculiar importance pertains to this scene, because it is the 
first portrayal of the Net in Egypt, and possibly the very first 
vepresentation connected with fishing the whole world over. 
It, moreover, as an illustration merely of fish, antedates (if 
avoiding the Scylla of Petrie’s and the Charybdis of Albright’s 
chronologies we steer by Lepsius’s chart) the famous Sumerian 
scene of Gilgamesh carrying fish, by some four centuries.4 
The tomb of Zau furnishes one or two representations of 
1 Yet compare the Scriptural prohibition, ‘‘ Thou shalt not seethe a kid in 
his mother’s milk,’’ which appears to have been one of the commandments 
included in the earliest Decalogue. Sir J. G. Frazer discusses this curious 
injunction in Folklove in the Old Testament, vol. III. p. tir ff. 
2 Vol. I. pl. 10, f. 11. , 
3 Petrie, Medum (1892), Pl. XI. A good example (Vth Dynasty) of a Net 
heaped up in a boat is found in N. de G. Davies, Ptakhetep (London, 1901), 
Pl. VI., in the right-hand column of the hieroglyphs. 
4 See my Assyrian Chapter, p. 368. The Gilgamesh representation dates 
c. 2800 B.C. 
