BY KINGS AND PRIESTS—PIANKHI 321 
prestige—was identical. Where the people abstained, they 
ate; where the people ate, they abstained. 
The Kings as High Priests seem, down to Ptolemaic times, 
to have eschewed fish absolutely. The Stele of Piankhi, at any 
rate, indicates their practice c. 700 B.c. To this Nubian 
conqueror of Egypt came the petty Kings of the Delta to offer 
submission ; but ‘‘ they, whose legs from fear were as the 
legs of women, entered not into the King’s house, because they 
were unclean and eaters of fish, which is an abomination for 
the Court: but King Namlot, he entered, because he was 
pure, and ate not fish.’’ ! 
The reason for this insistence by a Nubian lay perhaps in 
the fact that Piankhi had as monarch of Egypt just been 
affiliated to the Sun-god, who not only created righteousness, 
but lived and fed upon it. A curious prayer or semi-threat 
by one of the dead survives. If he be not allowed to face his 
enemy in the great council of the gods, the Sun-god should 
or would come down from Heaven and live on fish in the Nile, 
while Hapi, the god of the river, should or would ascend to 
Heaven and feed on righteousness. The granting of his 
prayer or the fulfilment of his threat would reverse the whole 
scheme of creation.? 
The word translated by abomination signifies generally 
something dirty. The epithet, if the Deltaic kings resembled 
the Deltaic fishermen, is not inappropriate. Many represen- 
tations of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties render the latter, 
in contradistinction to their brothers of the river proper, 
with scrubby beards, uncouth of aspect and scant of dress— 
a characteristic which Diodorus Siculus notes, when describing 
their habitations as mere cabins of reeds. 
But in fairness it must be remembered that since nearly 
all history and representations reach us from Upper Egypt, 
these portraits may merely typify the contempt or dislike 
felt by the richer and more civilised Nilotic for his Deltaic 
1 J. H. Breasted, Records of Ancient Egypt (Chicago, 1906-7), vol. IV., 
ar. 882. 
B 2 See Hastings’ Ency. of Religion and Ethics, vol. X. pp. 796 and 482, and 
Zeitschrift fiir dgyptische Sprache, vol. 49, p. 51 (Leipzig, 1911). 
