FISH AND GODS—FISH MUMMIES 325 
Figures (even of food, as I have shown) drawn in the tombs 
were supposed to retain their original powers. To avoid their 
contact with the dead by walking into his chamber, figures 
of human beings, of animals including snakes, of birds, but 
not of insects, were, at any rate in the VIth and XIIth 
Dynasties, frequently mutilated.! 
A prayer 2 shows how real was the fear: ‘“‘ Let not decay 
caused by any reptile make an end of me, and let them not 
come against me in their various forms.” The danger to the 
royal Ka from a fish swimming, or from the fish Clavias macra- 
canthus walking from its habitat in the Upper Nile into the 
tomb chapel, beggars description ! 
The apparent anomaly, that while scenes of fishing occur 
in the tombs as often as those of fowling and hunting, and that 
while the latter frequently, the former never, figure in the 
offerings, is (according to Lacau 3) quite easy of explanation. 
When a man dies, he is identified with and taken to Osiris, to 
whom, like the other gods, no fish was meet for offerings, 
whereas the scenes, which depicted them, were representations 
of what a man had done or known in his lifetime. 
Additional doubts whether the ban against fish-offerings 
met with exceptions, are caused by the discovery of models 
of fish buried in the XIXth Dynasty foundation-deposits 
along with those of fowl, beef, etc.4 Perhaps the modelling 
differentiates the instance. If fish were neither meet nor 
permissible offerings to the gods, how came it that some deities 
were venerated in connection with fish ? 
The evidence of Strabo that the Lates niloticus was at 
Latopolis,5 a city named in the fish’s honour, revered in con- 
junction with a goddess whom he terms Athena, may, like that 
of many another globe-trotter, perhaps, be discounted. 
But when we find in the scattered stones of that temple 
1 Mutilation was not invariable, even in the XIIth Dynasty, as Beni 
Hasan discloses. 
2 In the Book of the Dead, Chapter 154. 
3 P. Lacau, Suppressions et modifications des signes dans les textes fune- 
braives, Zeitschrift fiir A4gyptische Sprache, vol. 51 (1913), 42 ff. 
4 Petrie, Six Temples at Thebes (London, 1897), Pl. XVI., £. 15, fish from 
foundation deposit of Taussert, and Pl. XVIII., from Siptah. 
5 XVII. 1, 47. Latopolis is now Esneh. 
