FISH AS QUEENS’ PIN-MONEY, AND TAXES 335 
a net instead.! By day it serves to catch fish, while at night 
he spreads it over the bed in which he is to rest and creeping 
in goes to sleep underneath.” While struck by the resemblance 
to Goldsmith’s article of furniture, 
“ A bed by night, a chest of drawers by day,” 
we are forced once more to “scrat head,’’ and very hard. 
Imagination reels before the mesh of a Net, capable alike of 
catching a marketable fish and denyinga gnat ! 
Fish intended for immediate use were usually dressed on 
the boat and quickly dispatched to market ; the rest of the 
catch was opened ashore, split, salted, and hung to dry in the 
sun. Pictures? of all these operations, and examples of 
splitting knives, survive. Splitting in the earlier eras, for some 
reason, ran, not sheer down the back, but always rather to one 
side or other. 
Promptness of curing in a hot climate like Egypt was all 
important. Diodorus, indeed, tells us that practically all fish 
were at once pickled or salted, a statement confirmed by Julius 
Pollux’s mention of the Egyptian tariché, especially that from 
Canopus, being exported * far and wide, certainly to Palestine, 
whither ‘‘ the Egyptian fish came in baskets or barrels.” 4 
Prices of wheat, honey, fish and other wares occur in 
Spiegelberg’s work,® but no attempt is made by him (as far 
as I know) to correlate the prices in ancient and modern Egypt. 
I essay the task more as a jeu d’esprit than for any result 
of economic value, by means of the Mugil capito. This grey 
mullet has been identified with the ancient ‘Ad, a fish which 
figures frequently in the representations, e.g. in the Tomb of 
Ti, of Ptah-hotep,6 and of Naqada.? Its habit of ascending the 
1 IT. 95. 
2 See Alan H. Gardiner, The Tomb of Amenemhat (London, 1915), Pl. II, 
and Petrie, Medum, Pl. XII. 
3 Onomasticon, VI. 48. A primitive method of curing prevailed in the 
last century among the Yapoos—‘‘ the fisher then bites out a large piece of 
the fish’s belly, takes out the inside, and hangs the fish on a stick by the fire 
in his canoe.” See Darwin, Voyages of Adventure, etc. (London, 1839), p. 428. 
4 Mish., Makhshivin, VI. 3. The Greeks and Copts of the present day, 
whose enjoined fasts are frequent, rarely split their fish before packing them in 
large earthen pots. 
5 Rechnungen aus den Zeit Setis, I. 87 ff. 
6 Quibell, The Ramesseum (London, 1898), Pl. XXXIIL. 
7 J. de Morgan, Ethnographie Préhistorique (Paris, 1897), 193. 
