CHAPTER XXIII

“THE NILE IS EGYPT”

This terse epigram seems foreshadowed by Homer, who calls the river (ὁ) Αἴγυπτος, and the country (ή) Αἴγυπτος, thus indicating correctly that Egypt is only the Nile valley.[748]

The all importance of the river to the country meets early and general recognition. In a hymn[749] it is lauded as “the creator of all things good”: solemn rituals from the earliest down to Mohammedan times implored “a good Nile”: temples in its honour existed at Memphis, Heliopolis, and Nilopolis: at Silsileh ceremonies and sacrifices,[750] from time immemorial, welcomed its annual rise; magnificent festivals were universal throughout the land.[751]

To Egypt, river or country, goes out the undying reverence of all Anglers. Whether Egyptian or the Sumerian civilisation were the older; which of the two have left the earlier signs of a written language[752]; whether the Egyptian surpassed the Assyrian empire in extent or magnificence—about all these points “disquisitions” (in Walton’s word) have not ceased.

But to Egypt belongs the glory of holding in future and happy thrall world-wide subjects, who salute, or rather should salute (had previous writers not been reticent on the point) her (and not Assyria) as the historical mistress and foundress of the art of Angling.

In my Assyrian and Jewish chapters I stress the remarkable absence, despite the close and long connections of these nations with the land of the Nile, of anything graven or written which indicates knowledge of the Rod. In Egypt two instances of Angling are depicted: the first[753] probably (to judge by his place on the register) by a servant or fishing-ghillie as early as _c._ 2000 B.C., the second by a magnate some 600 years later.[754]

The argument of silence—because a thing is not depicted or mentioned it therefore never existed—often pushes itself unjustifiably. May not absence of the Rod be an instance? Had Mesopotamia (it may be further urged) been endowed with the atmospherical dryness of Egypt and the consequent preservative qualities of its soil instead of a widely-spread marsh-engendered humidity, would not scenes of Angling there probably meet our eyes? Humidity may account for great losses in Mesopotamia, but its toll in the Delta of Egypt was also heavy. This large area has yielded, compared with the Upper Kingdom, inappreciable returns.

But even if the country of the Two Rivers had possessed the same climatic conditions as the Upper Kingdom, it could never have become to the same extent the historical storehouse for posterity of the works and records of ancient Man.

Difference in religious belief, for one thing, precluded. The Sumerians, the first settlers recognised by history in the plains of Shinar, conceived (as did their successors the Babylonians and Assyrians) the next world to be a forbidding place of darkness and dust beneath the earth, to which all, both good and bad, descended. Hence burial under the court of a house or the floor of a room, often without any tomb or coffin, or much equipment for the life beyond the grave, was sufficient.

In belief and equipment the Egyptians differed _toto orbe_. For them after death was pre-ordained a life to obtain which the body must be preserved from destruction; otherwise it hastened to dissolution and second death, _i.e._ annihilation. To avoid this fate, they resorted to permanent tombs, embalmment, and mummification.

But as the Double, or _Ka_, of the departed (unlike the Soul, or _Ba_, which fared forth to follow the gods) never quitted the place where the mummy rested, daily offerings of food and drink for its sustenance had to be placed in the chapel chamber of the richer tombs. Sooner or later came the time when for reasons of expense, or other, the dead of former generations found themselves neglected, and the _Ka_ was reduced to seeking his food in the refuse of the town. To obviate such a desecration, and ensure that the offerings consecrated on the day of burial might for all time preserve their virtue, the mourners hit upon the idea of drawing and describing them on the walls of the chapel.

Furthermore to make homelike and familiar his new abode, or the “Eternal House” (in contrast to which the houses of the living were but wayside inns) elaborate precautions were taken. We find depicted on the walls of the chapel the lord of the domain, surrounded by sights and pursuits familiar to him when alive. “The Master in his tomb,” writes Maspero, “superintends the preliminary operations necessary to raise the food by which he is to be nourished in the form of funerary offerings: scenes and implements of sowing, harvesting, hunting, fishing meet his eye.”

From these representations of actual life, intended for the comfort of the dead, we, the living, are enabled not only to reconstruct in part the manner and social economy of the Ancient Egyptians, but also to gather, aided by excavated tackle, fairly accurate knowledge of their various devices for catching fish. And so to the religious conception which fostered the adornment of the tombs the gratitude of all fishermen is due, and should be deep.

If the god Hapi, who is represented with the girdle of a fisherman round his loins, and bearing lotus flowers, fowl, and fish, was hymned by the people as “the Creator of all things good,” to the Father of Rivers[755] the Father of History renders tribute for his gift of one “thing good” which furnished to all, bar kings and priests, a stable and staple food, fish.

Its economic importance can hardly be over-rated. Testimony as to its cheapness and abundance is not wanting. Of such is the wail of the poorer folk that the price of corn might be that of fish.[756] Not less impressive rings the plaint of wandering Israel—even heaven-sent manna apparently palls!—“we remember the fish we did eat in Egypt for naught.” The Egyptians accounted the fish plague, next to the death of the firstborn, as direst in result.

Confirmatory witnesses are Diodorus Siculus, who notes the great number and the many varieties of fish found in the Nile,[757] and Ælian, who neatly and truly characterises the aftermath of the annual inundation as “a harvest of fish.”[758] Evidence, again, of “a plenty” of fish, its pursuit, and its copious consumption fronts us in the prehistoric kitchen-middens and in the bone or horn harpoons of pre-dynastic graves. Later, the frequent tomb fishing-scenes and some textual notices attest absence of dearth.

The numerous slate palettes in the pre-dynastic graves furnish Mr. Bates with further proof, and with a new theory, which seems to me, if ingenious, too ingenuous and too far-fetched.

The palettes,[759] almost invariably presenting the profile of only those fishes, birds, or beasts that historic men pursued for food, were intended (by the aid of colours extracted from the malachite, galena, etc., crushed upon them) to establish an unpalpable, but, in human eyes, very serviceable connection between the fisher and his prey.

One method of such connection consists in creating a likeness of the intended quarry. Such a likeness, by the belief that the _simulacrum_ is actively _en rapport_ with that which it represents, bestows on the possessor power over the original. “Cases,” Bates correctly adds, “of this sort are the commonplaces of imitative magic.” Usually a hunting or fishing amulet which simulates the form of the quarry was worn by the owner, or attached to his gear.

The palettes themselves played the part of mere paint-stones, but their supposed resident power might very efficaciously be transferred to its proprietor by means of _the paint ground upon it_.

“Persons who go in pursuit of the crocodile,” says Pliny, “anoint themselves with its fat.”[760] In the same way as the crocodile-hunter thus assimilates himself to his quarry by a direct contagion, so the owner of the palette could possess himself of the power in the slate likeness by painting himself with the “medicine” ground upon it.

The validity, or otherwise, of the suggestion must be determined by expert mythologists. The theory, to my mind, appears too far-fetched, and breaks down from the introduction of an additional agency.

The fisher wearing an amulet or attaching a charm to his tackle, and the fat-anointed crocodile hunter both supposedly have direct connection with his quest.

But Bates’s solution demands four agents at work, the fisher, the prey, the portrayed profile of the latter, and the palette; from these the fisher extracts the desired power by decorating himself with the paint made out of a fifth agency, the galena, etc. Here exists no direct contagion as with the crocodile hunter, or direct connection as with the amulet-wearing _piscator_. That such early men as the pre-dynasties, though possessed of no insignificant a culture, should reason by causation at a fifth remove, seems lacking in probability, especially in a matter of primitive semi-religious belief, which is ever slow, ever resentful of change.

FOOTNOTES:

[747] The illustration is reproduced by the kind permission of Prof. Flinders Petrie.

The data for this essay had been collected and half of it written, when I heard of an article on _Ancient Egyptian Fishing_ by Mr. Oric Bates, in _Harvard African Studies_, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1917. While somewhat disappointed of not being the first to write in English on the subject, I was quickly reconciled by the fact that the task had fallen to an experienced Egyptologist, whose monograph, while making necessary the recasting of this chapter, bequeathed to me some new, if not always convincing theories, and much technical and other data, the frequent use of which I gladly acknowledge.

[748] _Od._, IV. 477, and XVII. 448. In _Th._ 338 of Hesiod, who, though not a contemporary, flourished shortly after Homer, ὁ Νεῖλος first appears. The Egyptians called it _Hapi_, but in the vernacular language _Yetor_, or Ye-or = the River, or _Yaro_ = the great River.

[749] _Papyrus Sallier_, II. On the other hand, another hymn speaks of the unkindness of the Nile in bringing about the destruction of fish, but it is the river at its lowest (first half of June) that is meant. See _Records of the Past, being English translations of ancient monuments of Egypt and Western Asia_ (ed. S. Birch, vols. I.-XII. 1873-81), IV. 3, and _ibid._, new series (A. H. Sayce), III. 51.

[750] The yearly sacrifice of a virgin at Memphis may be doubted—at least for the Christian age of Egypt, to which Arab writers wish to attribute it.

[751] The Νειλῶα are described by Heliodorus, IX. 9.

[752] J. H Breasted, _A History of the Ancient Egyptians_, 1908, p. 47, declares that the Egyptians discovered true alphabetical _letters_ 2500 years before any other people, and the calendar as early as 4241 B.C.

[753] P. E. Newberry, _Beni Hasan_ (London, 1893), Plate XXIX. Cf. Lepsius, _Denk. Abt._, 2, Bl. 127; J. G. Wilkinson, _Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians_ (London, 1878), p. 116, pl. 371.

[754] _Ibid., loc. cit._, pl. 370.

[755] The Nile is the second longest river in the world (Perthes, _Taschen Atlas_). The Egyptians believed that it sprang from four sources at the twelfth gate of the nether world, at a place described in ch. 146 of the _Book of the Dead_, and that it came to light at the two whirlpools of the first cataract.

[756] Brugsch., _Dict. Supplem._, 1915. Cf. _Stèle de l’an_ VIII. _de Rameses_ II., by Ahmed Bey Kamal (_Rec. trav._, etc., vol. 30, pp. 216-217). The King, as an instance of how well his workmen are provided for, cites the fact that special fishermen are allotted to them.

[757] I. 36.

[758] _N. H._, X. 43, ἄμητος ἰχθύων.

[759] _Op. cit._, 204 ff.

[760] _N. H._, XXX. 8.