The statement, “the Nile contains all sorts and kinds of fish,”[802] must in an age of scientific enumeration be taken with several grains of salt. The total for the whole country, riverine and marsh, reaches but seventy-one species, of which only two, Mormurops anguillaris and Haplochilus schælleri, are peculiar to Egypt.[803] A score or so find representation in ancient times; but identification is far from easy, and is in some cases, e.g. the Mullets, only possible generically.

In scenes of the return of Hatshepsut’s expedition from the land of Punt the drawings of the fishes are so characteristic that Prof. Doenitz has been enabled to determine their species, and identify them as belonging to the Red Sea. The powers of observation in the artists accompanying the ships demonstrate careful training. But I cannot, since the eyes of the Solea are similar, endorse the eulogism bestowed in the case of a sole, unless it were a freak, “one eye is drawn larger than the other, showing a fine observation of Nature!”[804]

The priests, the King, and the commonalty in some cases eschewed fish.

Priestly abstention was by no means uncommon, as some of the temples of Poseidon[805] demonstrate. In Egypt the observance was strict, at Askalon the reverse. Plutarch,[806] confirming and amplifying Herodotus,[807] writes:—“The priests indeed entirely abstain from all sorts: therefore on the ninth day of the first month (Thoth), when all the rest of the Egyptians are obliged by their religion to eat a fried fish before the doors of their houses, they only burn them, not tasting them at all, assigning as their reasons two, the second of which—indeed, the most manifest and obvious—is that fish is neither a dainty, nor even a necessary kind of food.”[808]

But by the priests of Atargatis, to whose subjects ichthyophagia was under pain of blains, boils, and other dire diseases absolutely forbidden, fish boiled and roasted were daily offered, and by them daily eaten.[809]

The religious ceremony in Thoth may have been merely a later aspect of a taboo once possibly universal among the class from which the priesthood largely drew, or may, perhaps, have been prompted by the desire of obtaining a good fish harvest. Apart from the uneconomic depletion of food entailed by the prescribed eating, the killing of “the children” or possessions of the deity seems hardly the best way to secure fruition of such desire.

If, however, the feast survived as a relic of Totemism, the ceremony may possibly come within Robertson-Smith’s conception of the origin of all religious communion or sacraments, i.e. a renewal of the connection between the god of the Totem tribe with his people at a meal, where “the Totem itself is sacrificed at an annual feast, with special and solemn ritual.”[810]

In the same way, eating of fish by the priests at Askalon may have originated from the idea of bringing the deity and his servants into closer relationship, and may have been continued to impress their religious superiority on the mass of the people, who were forbidden such food, and thus any direct connection with their god. Although the practice was different, the object of both priesthoods—enhancement of their religious 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.”[811]

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.[812]

The word translated by abomination signifies generally something dirty. The epithet, if the Deltaic kings resembled the Deltaic fishermen, is not inappropriate. Many representations 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 brethren,[813] in whom some writers profess to discern an indigenous and less progressive race.

Were the records and art of Buto, for example, a capital once ranking in importance and opulence with Thebes, available, another story and another picture might confront us. Owing in the main to humidity, our conceptions are perforce coloured by the traditions of Upper Egypt, and thus at times liable to deception.

Is it, for instance, likely that the priests and denizens of the Delta, where maritime commerce principally furnished their prosperity, regarded the sea with the same loathing and dread that the riverine priests and writers express? Can we really imagine the priests of Alexandria not eating salt because it was “Typho’s foam,” or not speaking to pilots because they do business on the great waters, or embellishing their temples with figures (like those at Saïs) of an infant, an old man, a hawk, a fish, and a sea-horse?

The meaning of these figures, according to Plutarch,[814] “is plainly this: O! ye who are coming into or going out of the world, God hateth impudence, for by the hawk is intended God, by the fish hatred on account of the sea, as has been before observed, and by the sea-horse impudence, the creature being said first to slay his sire, and then force his mother.”

How and when did the abstention from fish arise? Was it originally a tabu observed by all, kings, priests, nobles, and commons?[815] Did the last come gradually to disregard or were they forced by food pressure to rebel against it? Did the nobles in the Old and Middle Kingdoms occasionally wobble in their diet? All these questions meet with no adequate answer.

An answer to the first, i.e. the date and reason of the abstention, as yet baffles even the richness of the fertile preservative sands of Egypt, since adequate data must stretch back to pre-dynastic periods.

One fact stands out. The lower classes very early eschewed the tabu and ensued after fish. Their example was followed later by the upper classes, “with whom fish became a favourite dish: the epicure knew each variety, and in which water the most dainty were to be caught. It was, therefore, a most foolish invention of later Egyptian theology to declare that fish were unclean to the orthodox, and so much to be avoided that a true believer might have no fellowship with those that did.”[816]

Robertson-Smith declares that the doctrine—the highest degree of holiness can only be attained by abstinence—resulted from the political fusion in Egypt of numerous local cults in one national religion, with a national priesthood that represented imperial ideas.[817]

The statement, “countless pictures of offerings to the gods and the dead survive, but never a fish among them” has in the light of subsequent discoveries to be revised. One strong reason at any rate existed in its favour. In the Pyramid texts carved on the sepulchral chambers of the Pharaohs of the VIth Dynasty the hieroglyph of the fish was deliberately suppressed, which goes far to prove that fish were regarded as impure for kings. Furthermore, in the thousands of lines which contain spells for the future benefit of these dead Kings not one figure of a fish occurs.

On the other hand, evidence exists of practices in apparent conflict with the above facts. Newberry,[818] provides two Middle Kingdom instances of fish being brought to the owner of the tomb, and Maspero[819] one of the New Kingdom.

Then, again, how about the famous representations of fish, both upon an altar and also on the face of an altar, in Capart’s work?[820] These basalt statues (he holds) exhibit the King making offerings of fish; others regard them merely as the King marching at the head of the Nile gods, and himself representing the great river, “the giver of all things good.”

Donations of fish were frequently made to the temples by the Kings. Rameses III., for instance (as the Harris Papyrus discloses) presented thousands and thousands, labelled “dressed, cut up, and from the canal.”[821] These gifts were not for the priests, but (probably) for their employés or the populace.

We read (in the Hammamat Stele) of “the officers of the Court Fishermen” attendant on Rameses IV. Their task, unlike that of a similar corps in the Chinese court whose duty (inter alia) was to manage the arrangements for the Emperor’s sport, principally consisted in securing “a plenty of fish” for the enormous entourage and servants of the monarch.

But the Pharaohs till Cleopatra were, as far as I can gather, personally as free from the sin of fishery, as the net offered to the Syrian goddess in the epigram of Heliodorus.[822]

The problem as to fish being offered or not to the gods or the dead may possibly be solved, if we bear in mind that while fish are never mentioned in the longer versions of the offering texts of the Old Kingdoms, and are not represented in the pictures of the food provided for the dead before the XIIth Dynasty, after that date some occasional instances to the contrary do occur.

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.[823]

A prayer[824] 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 Clarias macracanthus 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[825]) 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.[826] 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,[827] a city named in the fish’s honour, revered in conjunction 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 various sorts of fish, one enclosed in a royal cartouche[828] and at the same place a Ptolemaic-Roman cemetery, containing great numbers of Lates, mummified by art or Nature,[829] 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,[830] 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[831] 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.”[832]