[915] In the Neo-Babylonian period the word, which makes its first appearance in this contract, employed for _net_ appears to have been _salītu_ or _lītu_. The word is written _sa-li-tum_, and the first syllable (_sa_) may be either part of the word, or else the determinative _riksu_, which is written before things made of cordage. If the word be read _salītu_, it may perhaps be derived from the root, _salû_, _to immerse_. The rendering of the word as _net_ is not quite certain, but, as will be seen from the translation of the text, the context points to this meaning. It is clearly some sort of tackle used by fishermen, and the most obvious meaning would be net. [916] See _antea_, 333 f., and _Tebtunis Papyri_, vol. II. pp. 180-181. B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, 1907. CHAPTER XXXIII FISH-GODS—DAGON I find no trace in Assyria of Ichthyolatry, or of certain fish being accounted sacred, or forbidden as food. The nearest approach to abstention occurs in the warning that on the 9th day of Iyyar to partake of fish was almost certain to bring on an attack of sickness, just as in Syria ichthyophagy was held to entail ulcers and wasting diseases.[917] Despite the Dagon or Oannes traditions, I am not convinced that in the crowded pantheon of Babylon or Assyria there can be found a fish-god proper, or god of fishing, _i.e._ a deity similar to those of Greece and Rome with a temple and established priesthood, to whom fishermen made prayer and offerings either for boons received or favours to come. If the word, fish-god, is limited strictly to those images, half-man, half-fish, which are to be found on seal Cylinders,[918] or sculptured or depicted in the outer halls or walls of some deity’s temple, there is certainly—even if the images at Nineveh were importations from the Mediterranean coast and not indigenous—considerable proof of their existence. But if the word connotes the attributes of a special temple, a priesthood, and sacrifices, such as we find in connection with the Philistinian Dagon at Ashdod, I suggest there is no proof whatever. The fact seems to be that in early Sumeria the fish-god or man-fish was a _symbol_ of Ea, the god of water, and probably derived from Aquarius.[919] The Assyrian colonists carried north with them the pantheon of the Babylonians, composed in part of the local deities of Sumeria, and in part of their own translated from their original habitat; but from the start they modified the hierarchy and changed materially the individual attributes of the gods.[920] Thus we find that mighty Assyrian hunter, Tiglath-Pileser I., in his record of the beasts he had taken, _e.g._ four elephants caught alive, or had slain in the desert, which included “four wild oxen mighty and terrible, ten elephants, one hundred and twenty lions on foot, and eight hundred speared from his chariot,” ascribing his success to the help of the gods Ninurta and Nergal.