ICIITHYOPHAGI, a fisher race of the ancients, on the coasts of Persia, the Sir Matsya or Ser mahi. Fish to this day is the staple article of food of the inhabitants on the sea-coast of Baluchistan. In the Shatt-ul-Arab, fish are caught and cured, and sold at one shilling the cwt. ; for six months the people of Basra live on almost nothing else, and also from Basra to Hormuz., the sea-coast people principally live on fish; and manuscript dictionaries describe the bread or food called Mahi-abah or Mahi-ashnah, used chiefly among the people of Lar, as prepared from fish (more particularly a small kind found near Hormuz), dried by exposing it to the sun. Strabo and Arrian relate that the ancient Ichthyophagi made into bread the fishes, which they had dried and roasted in a similar manner. The region of the Ichthyophagi com menced at Malana, near Cape Arabah, and ended between the ancient Dagasira and the place now called Cape Jask, or more properly Jashk. Church ill's Collection of Voyages mentions that the coastes of Persia as they sailed in this sea, seemed as a parched wildernesse, without tree or grass ; those few people that dwell there, and in the islands of Lar and Cailon, live on fish, being in manner themselves transformed into the nature of fishes. So excellent swimmers are they, that,
seeing a vessel in the seas, though stormie and tempestuous, they will swimme to it 5 or 6 miles to begge almes. They cate their fish with rice, having no bread ; their cats, hennes, dogges, and other creatures which they keepe have no other dyet.' Nieuhoff, who travelled in 1662, says that about Gambroon the common people make use of dates instead of bread or rice • for it is observ able that the ordinary food of the Indians all along the coast from Basora to Sind is dates and fish dried in the air; the heads and guts of the fishes they mix with date-stones, and boil it all to gether with a little salt water, which they give at night to the cows after they come out of the field, where they meet with very little herbage.'—As. Res. ix. p. 68 ; MacGregor; Taylor's Travels from England to India, i. p. 266 ; Churchill's Collection of Voyages, ii. p. 230 (first ed.); Ouseley's 7'r. i. p. 228 ; Townsend's Outram and Havelock, p. 297.