Evidence that fishing in India was of old and is now (the fishing caste, I am told, ranks low) not highly regarded can be deduced (_inter alia_) from its total omission in the Fourteen Sciences and the Sixty-four Arts, which the _Vātsyặyana Kāma Sūtra_ (not later than the third century A.D.) promulgates for the education of children from five to sixteen. Among the requisite Sciences gymnastics, dancing, the playing of musical glasses, sword-stick, cock quail and ram fighting, teaching parrots and starlings to sing, all these find commendation, but fishing none! As with India, so with Persia ancient and modern, _toujours le filet_! Very many of the earliest prose works in modern Persian came through the Pahlavi from the Sanskrit. Thus the three or four stories—occasionally but wrongly regarded as of Persian origin—about fish and fishing which are contained in the _Anwār-i-Suhaili_[94] can be traced to _The Fables of Bidpai_, or _The Pancatantra_,[95] translated from the Arabic version into Persian about 550 A.D. In modern Persian (_c._ 1000 A.D.) poetry, lines allusive to fishing dot themselves sparsely:[96] even in them the Net bulks biggest. Hafiz (fourteenth century), however, gives us “I have fallen into a Sea of Troubles, (presumably tears), So that my Beloved may catch me with a Hook” (a curl of hair). A passage in Arabic furnished hope of finding Angling oases in the desert, but when in “A fish whose jaw the gaff of Death had pierced,” I found the word (_saffūd_) rendered _gaff_ given by Richardson’s _Persian-Arabic Dictionary_ as “a roasting spit, a poker for the fire,” my hope fled, for I quickly realised here an instance of anachronistic translation, or the employment of fishing terms appropriate to modern but inapplicable to ancient methods.[97] I have come to the sad conclusion that the Persians ancient and modern care not in general for fishing or angling, although the Gulf, from which the ancient Sumerians garnered such splendid “harvest of the sea,” washes their shores, and from their mountains descend “fishful” streams. I have reached my conclusion for the following reasons:— (A) There is no word in the language which properly expresses _fish_-hook. Arabic words, which strictly mean _grappling_ hooks, have been adopted or adapted. In modern Arabic itself these words are not used for a _fish-hook_: bâlûgh, a foreign term, prevails. (B) In Persian, Arabic, and Turkish[98] the expression _to fish_, literally translated, equals _to hunt fish_, and generally describes a man who makes his living by _netting_, and selling fish. (C) There is no word for fishing-rod in Wollaston’s great English-Persian Dictionary.