ABSTENTION FROM FISH
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]
FOOTNOTES:
[802] Diodorus Siculus, I. 36.
[803] Cf. G. A. Boulenger, _Fishes of the Nile_ (London, 1907), and
Pierre Montet, _Les Poissons employés dans l’Ecriture Hieroglyphique_.
Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale. Tome XI., 1913.
[804] _Egypt_, Pt. II. p. 226. Bædeker, Leipsic, 1892.
[805] _Antea_, p. 201.
[806] _De Iside et Osiride_, c. 8.
[807] II. 37.
[808] From the _Trans._ of S. Squire.
[809] Mnaseas, as quoted by Athenæus, VIII. 37.
[810] W. Robertson-Smith, _The Religion of the Semites_ (Edinburgh,
1889), p. 276.
[811] J. H. Breasted, _Records of Ancient Egypt_ (Chicago, 1906-7),
vol. IV., par. 882.
[812] See Hastings’ _Ency. of Religion and Ethics_, vol. X. pp. 796 and
482, and _Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache_, vol. 49, p. 51 (Leipzig,
1911).
[813] Their brawling in boats and carousing in drink are depicted. Cf.
N. de G. Davies, _Tombs of El Gebrawi_, Pt. II. (London, 1902), Pl. V.,
and Newberry, _Beni Hasan_, Pt. II., Pl. IV., and Davies, _Ptahhetep_,
Pt. II., Pl. XIV., and Pt. I., Pl. XXI. In the XXth Dynasty the
chastity of their wives was not a striking characteristic.
[814] _Op. cit._, XXXII.
[815] Fish hieroglyphs are regarded by some as general determinatives
for words meaning “shame,” “evil,” etc. (cf. Plutarch, _op. cit._,
32), and by others as merely phonetic determinatives (cf. Montet, _op.
cit._, p. 48). That fish were regarded as either enemies or emblems
of enemies of the gods and of the kings would seem to be borne out by
the ceremony annually performed at Edfu, where the festival calendar
contains the following: “Fish are thrown on the ground, and all the
priests hack and hew them with knives, saying ‘Cut ye wounds on your
bodies, kill ye one another: Ra triumphs over his enemies, Horus of
Edfu over all evil ones.’” The text assures us that “the meaning of the
ceremony is to achieve the destruction of the enemies of the gods and
king.” Cf. Erman, _Handbook of Egyptian Religion_, trs. by Griffith
(London, 1907), p. 216.
[816] Erman, _Egyptian Life_, Eng. Trs. (London, 1894), p. 239, basing
himself on Mariette’s statement in _Monuments divers recueillis en
Égypte_, pp. 151, 152.
[817] _Op. cit._, p. 284.
[818] _El Bersheh_, Pt. I. (London, n. d.), Pl. XXIII.
[819] _Tombeau de Nakhti_ (Mém. de la Mission française au Caire, vol.
V. fasc. 3., Paris, 1893), Fig. 4, p. 480.
[820] _Les Monuments des Hycsos_, Bruxelles, 1914. Connected with these
and somewhat confirming Capart appear to be two life-size figures
of Amenemhat III., in one of which the king is seated between two
goddesses holding fish.
[821] These offerings (15,500 dressed, 2,200 white fish, etc.) are
named under the heading, “Oblations of the festivals which the King
founded for his Father Amon-Re.” But in the summary of the good
deeds wrought for the gods by Rameses III.—“I founded for them
divine offerings of barley, wheat, wine, incense, fruit, cattle
and fowl”—observe the complete silence as to _fish_, because these
offerings were to the gods, not to the temples. Cf. Breasted, _Ancient
Records_, IV., paragraphs 237, 243, and 363.
[822] _Antea_, p. 123.
[823] Mutilation was not invariable, even in the XIIth Dynasty, as Beni
Hasan discloses.
[824] In the _Book of the Dead_, Chapter 154.
[825] P. Lacau, _Suppressions et modifications des signes dans les
textes funebraires_, Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache, vol. 51
(1913), 42 ff.
[826] Petrie, _Six Temples at Thebes_ (London, 1897), Pl. XVI., f. 15,
fish from foundation deposit of Taussert, and Pl. XVIII., from Siptah.
[827] XVII. 1, 47. Latopolis is now Esneh.
[828] Wilkinson, _op. cit._, III. 343, f. 586.
[829] See _Proc. Soc. Biblical Archæology_, XXI. p. 82, for a picture
of a bronze mummy-case containing remains of a small Lates.
[830] L. Loat, _Saqqara Mastabas_, I. Gurob. Plates 7, 8, 9, and Petrie
and Currelly, _Ehnasya_, 1905, p. 35.
[831] _Op. cit._, p. 346.
[832] See Bates, p. 234, ff.