MAIM PERS. A fish. From Basrah to Hor muz, the sea-coast people still principally live on fish. The Mahi-abah and Mahi-ashnah, literally fish bread and fish soup, used among the people of Lar, is prepared from fish (more particularly a small kind found near Hormuz) by exposing it to the sun. Strabo and Arrian relate that the ancient Ichthyophagi made into bread in a similar manner the fishes which they had dried and roasted. The region of the Ichthyophagi com menced at Malana near Cape Arabah, and ended between the ancient Dagasira and the place now called Cape Jashk. Churchill'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 Tar and Callon, live on fish, being in manner themselves trans formed into the nature of fishes. So excellent
swimmers are they, that seeing a vessel in the seas, though stortnie and tempestuous, they will swimme to it five or six miles to begge They eate 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 Gambraon the common people make use of dates instead of bread or rice ; for it is observable that the ordin ary food of the Indians all along the coast from Basora to Sinde is dates and fish dried in the air ; the heads and guts of the fishes they mix with date stones, and boil it all together 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.'