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.”