326 ABSTENTION FROM FISH 
various sorts of fish, one enclosed in a royal cartouche ! and at 
the same place a Ptolemaic-Roman cemetery, containing great 
numbers of Lates, mummified by art or Nature,? and when 
further we find at Gurob, near the old Moeris Canal, cemeteries 
of the same fish unassociated with human remains, and dating 
from the XVIIIth or XIXth Dynasty, when we find all these, 
we are driven, as was the negro when faced with another, but 
logical, dilemma, to “ purtend brains, at any rate scrat heads.”’ 
Nor is our “ purtending or scratting ”’ ended, when attempts, 
based on the finding in the fish cemetery at Gurob of a small 
head of a goddess, are made to connect the Athena of Strabo 
with Hathor, to whom Keller 4 alleges that the Oxyrhynchus 
(often found embalmed at Thebes) was sacred. So, again, 
our clarity of ideas is not increased, when we read that Hat- 
mehyt was the patron goddess of Mendes, the capital of the 
XVI Nome (which of all the Nomes alone possessed a fish for 
its emblem) and that this fish is regularly represented above 
the head of Hat-mehyt. 
But one fact stands out as adverse to the identification of 
any god as a god of fish or connected with fishing. In the 
magico-religious welter of god-creating and god-adopting 
characteristic of the later Egyptians, who locally worshipped 
beasts, birds, reptiles, and insects, the first commandment 
given to Israel was faithfully observed, in that they made not 
unto themselves a graven or other image of any deity “‘ of the 
likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth.” & 
1 Wilkinson, op. cit., III. 343, f. 586. 
2 See Proc. Soc. Biblical Archeology, XXI. p. 82, for a picture of a bronze 
mummy-case containing remains of a small Lates. 
3 L. Loat, Saqqava Mastabas, I. Gurob. Plates 7, 8, 9, and Petrie and Currelly, 
Ehnasya, 1905, p. 35+ 
4 Op. cit., p. 346. 
5 See Bates, p. 234, ff. 
