356 FISHING METHODS 
been acquainted only with the last two, Line and Hook, 
and Net. 
Examples of the former method occur in Monuments of 
Nineveh (1st Series). In Plate 39 B, a man sitting on a terrace 
by a river is depicted in the act of landing a fish ; in Plate 67 B, 
a man is wading in a river with what seems to be identical with 
a creel. The first was excavated, and subsequently re-buried 
at Nimroud, the latter (also re-buried) at Kouyunjik. The 
second picture excites a livelier interest, for two men well 
into their fish are shown in the water astride the inflated skins 
of a goat—a method of crossing the Tigris as habitual then as 
in the present year of our century.} 
Despite Rawlinson’s sentence, “of early Chaldean (i.e. 
Sumerian) there are found made of bronze materials chains, 
nails, and fish-hooks,”’ 2 no specimen of a fish-hook, bronze 
or other, has been as yet obtained in Mesopotamia. It is 
impossible thus to determine whether the hooks were straight 
like those recorded by Plutarch, bent like those of the Odyssey, 
or barbed. Cros, however, claims that Lagash excavations 
yielded “copper fish hooks.”’ Rev. d’Assyr., vi. 48. 
Representations also fail to help, probably because a hook, 
plain and simple, hardly commends itself as a subject for 
artistic treatment. Nor does the primitive Assyrian sculptor, 
however distrustful of the imagination of the observer, go as 
far as to depict ‘‘ by conventional device ’’ a hook inside the 
mouth of the fish which is being taken ! 
In the Assyrian language there is apparently no word for 
fish-hook. From the resemblance between the Hebrew word 
haah, which means both thorn and fish-hook, and the Assyrian 
word fdhu, which, it is alleged, means thorn, it has been 
1 We sometimes find with an army crossing a river, as delineated in the 
sculptures, each soldier with the skin beneath his belly and paddling with his 
legs and arms, but retaining in his mouth one of the legs of the skin, into 
which he blows as into a bagpipe. The act of paddling across a big river, 
like the Euphrates, would of itself need all his breath; but King points out 
that the sculptor, in the spirit of primitive art, which, diffident of its own 
powers of portrayal or distrusting the imagination of the beholder, seeks to 
make its object clear by conventional devices, wishes to indicate that the 
skins are not solid bodies, and can find no better way of showing it than by 
making his swimmers continue blowing out the skins. 
2 Five Great Monarchies (London, 1862-67), vol. I. p. 99. 
