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opposite page Khnumhotep indulges in a fishing expedition where, according to the hieroglyphic caption, he spears thirty fish. A scene in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, based on a wall painting from Tomb 3 at Beni Hasan. above left A drawing of Khnumhotep’s spear-fishing scene. above An Old Kingdom painted relief from Rahotep’s tomb at Meidum. In the top left a man sits on the riverbank cleaning and splitting fish. Below, bearers carry a giant Nile perch suspended from a fishing spear. left A net full of fish. A relief from the tomb chapel of Akhethotep, now in the Musée du Louvre.
Hilary Wilson on… fish in ancient Egypt
In this issue HW looks at how this major source of protein was shared among the ancient Egyptian population, and asks, “Who ate all the fish?”
… every variety of fish and in numbers beyond belief … [supplying] abundant subsistence from fish freshly caught [and] an unfailing multitude for salting.
The Nile, according to Diodorus
Classical authors agreed that Egyptian priests were forbidden to eat fish and, since the King was nominally High Priest of every cult, the prohibition extended to the Pharaoh himself. Herodotus’s anecdotal evidence for a priestly taboo on the eating of fish, a restriction which might have applied when he visited Egypt c. 400 BC, was perpetuated by later writers and interpreted as a tradition pertaining to the preceding four millennia of Egyptian history. Authors of early studies on fishing in an
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