Professor Hommel in the March number for 1899 of these Proceedings calls attention in his Assyriological Notes to the name “Assara Mazas” appearing in a list of Assyrian gods. The section of the list in which this name appears contains “a number of foreign sounding names” belonging to gods honoured, presumably, in out-lying portions of the Assyrian dominions.

Professor Hommel claims “that this god (Assara Mazas) is no other than the Iranian Ahura Mazda,” and he thus concludes his arguments in favour of this opinion—“concerning Assara-mazas, I should like to remark in closing this paragraph, that we have here the same older pronunciation of Iranian words as in the Kassitic Surias, ‘sun’ (later Ahura and Hvarya, but comp. Sanscrit Asura and suria), which is of the highest importance for the history of the Aryan languages. In the same Kassitic period, between 1,700 and 1,200 B.C., I suppose was borrowed by the Assyrians the Iranian god Assara-mazas.”

In a Paper entitled The Median Calendar and the Constellation Taurus, printed in the June number for 1897 of these Proceedings, I made a very similar claim for the derivation of the name of the great god of the Assyrians—Assur.

The claim put forward was not based only on the resemblance in sound of “Assur” and “Ahura,” but was in the first place founded on the virtual identity of the emblems of Assur and Ahura Mazda. For the origin of these emblems (referring as it was suggested they did to the Zodiacal constellation Sagittarius) a date as high as 4,000 B.C. was, on astronomic grounds, assumed, and it was pointed out that at that date there was no evidence of the existence of the Assyrian nation as a nation, nor any trace of a Semitic worship of the god Assur; whereas, on the other hand, as early as 3,800 B.C. there is evidence that a powerful Aryan race—the Manda—rivalled the power, and threatened the Semitic rule of Sargon of Agane.

The opinion that the symbol of Ahura Mazda, and of Assur, was of ancient Aryan origin, naturally suggested the further thought that the name Assur, so closely resembling the earlier Indo-Iranian form Asura, of the Iranian Ahura, had, together with the emblem of the god, been borrowed from the Aryan ancestors of the Medo-Persians by the Semitic settlers who, early in the second millennium B.C., established themselves to the north of Babylonia. It may here be pointed out that no very certain Semitic derivation at present holds the field which the proposed Aryan derivation would occupy. According to some scholars it comes from a word signifying “a well-watered plain.” According to Professor Hommel, the name Assur is derived from a word which originally meant “the heavenly host.”

Professor Hommel, quoting as his authority the opinions of the Sanscrit scholar Oldenburg, and reinforcing Oldenburg’s opinions by arguments from other sources, further maintains the high probability of the Median god Ahura Mazda having been the representative of the Vedic Varuna, and also that Varuna was the moon.

Vedic scholars are divided in opinion as to what physical phenomenon is represented by Varuna. He is very generally supposed to personify “the vast extent of the encompassing sky,” some say especially the sky at night-time—others claim him as a solar divinity, whilst Oldenburg, as we have seen, supposes him to be the moon. It is not to the question, however, what phenomenon Varuna represented, but to that of the probability or improbability of his original identity with the Median Ahura Mazda, that I would now draw attention.

It is said that “the parallel in character, though not in name, of the god Varuna is Ahura Mazda, the Wise Spirit.” But a variety of considerations may lead us to entertain the possibility of a Vedic god other than Varuna being the parallel in character and in epithet of Ahura Mazda; a parallel which is also still more clearly to be recognized if we adopt the view, above contended for, of the identity of Assur, the archer god of Assyria, with Ahura Mazda.

The Vedic god Rudra is, like Varuna, an Asura or Spirit. He is described as “the wise,” and his votaries are encouraged to worship him “for a comprehensive and sound understanding.” But in one passage the epithet “asura maha,” so curiously recalling to our ears the name of the Avestan “Ahura Mazda,” is actually applied to him.[81] As a wise and great Asura, Rudra seems to be as close a parallel to Ahura Mazda as Varuna; the resemblance of epithet in the case of Rudra makes the parallelism closer.

Varuna indeed in Vedic estimation held a much higher and more commanding position than Rudra, but considering how opposed the Avestan was to Vedic mythology on important points, we ought not to expect that the god elevated by the Medians above all others should have held a very exalted place amongst the Brahmins of India.

But it is when we turn our thoughts not only to Ahura Mazda but to his Assyrian representative Assur, that the parallelism between him and Rudra becomes more marked.

Rudra is not only a wise and great Asura, he is above everything else celebrated in the Rig Veda as an archer. He has “the sure arrow, the strong bow.”[82] He is “the divine Rudra armed with the strong bow and fast flying arrows.”[83]

In the Paper already referred to, it was suggested that an astronomic observation of the equinoctial colure passing through the constellations Sagittarius and Taurus was the probable origin of Median and (as derived from Median) Assyrian symbolism concerning Ahura Mazda and Assur. This observation could, as was pointed out, only have been made at the date, in round numbers, of 4,000 B.C.

It is a very tempting enterprise to seek in the mythologies of European nations for allusions to this same astronomic observation—an observation made, as we may believe, when the ancestors of the Iranian and Indian Aryans, and possibly the ancestors of the European nations, were still, if not all dwelling together, at least within easy intellectual touch of each other.

In Grecian fable we have the Centaur (the Bull-killer) Chiron giving his name to the constellation Sagittarius, and in this fable we may, as it would seem, find a better astronomic explanation of the term Bull-killer than that usually given concerning the well-mounted Thessalian hunters of wild cattle. The constellation Sagittarius, an archer, half man, half horse, is not a figure of Grecian invention. It is to be met with depicted on Babylonian monuments, unmistakably the archer of our celestial sphere; and this constellation, when it rises in the east, always drives below the western horizon—i.e., mythically exterminates, the last stars of the constellation Taurus.

To Chiron, the chief Centaur, the epithet “wise” is especially given, and “he was renowned for his skill in hunting, medicine, music, gymnastics, and the art of prophecy”; of these not altogether congruous attributes Rudra the Vedic god possessed three of the most important. He was wise, he was an archer, and he was famed as “a chief physician among physicians.”[84] In a verse, part of which has been already quoted,[85] worshippers are exhorted to “Praise him who has the sure arrow, the strong bow, who presides over all sanitary drugs; worship Rudra for a comprehensive and sound understanding, adore the powerful divinity with prostrations.”

Apollo the far-darter, Artemis the goddess of the silver bow, also shared these same attributes, and Grecian legend would lead us to place them in the same part of the heavens as that allotted to Chiron—i.e., Sagittarius. Apollo prompted Artemis to aim a shaft from her bow at a point on the horizon, and this point was the head of the hunter Orion. Now the constellation Orion is exactly in opposition to the bow stars of Sagittarius; that the legend is astronomical is plainly to be inferred from its variant form, in which Artemis is represented as sending a Scorpion to sting Orion to death. The stars marking the Scorpion’s sting are in very close proximity to the bow stars of Sagittarius.

Returning to Indian myths, the name of Siva does not occur in the Rig Veda; but in later Sanscrit works Siva is the representative of Rudra. In a hymn to Siva,[86] the following passages occur, and it is difficult to read them and not be reminded of the sculptured figures of Artemis, crescent-crowned and leading a stag by the horns. (Allowance must be made, however, for the tendency in Hindu art to multiply the heads, arms, and features of their gods.)

“I worship the great Mahesa, who shines like ten million suns: who is adorned with triple eyes: who is crowned with the moon: who is armed with the trident, the bow, the mace, the discus, the goad, and the noose:

Who is the eternal Lord;

Who is bright as the snowy summit of Mount Kailáçe; whose matted hair is ablaze with the crescent moon;

.... ...

Whose hands hold the head of a deer and a battle-axe;

Whose forehead is adorned with the bright half-moon;

Whose fingers are interlaced to typify a deer;

.... ...”

For the explanation of the Roman myths of Dianus and Diana (varying forms as the dictionary tells of Janus and Jana) we may naturally seek for the same astronomic origin, as for those concerning the Grecian archer divinities.

Janus indeed has not, so far as I know, ever been represented as an archer or a Centaur. The attribute for which he is especially renowned is that of “opener of the year,” and this attribute, on the astronomic theory here proposed, would furnish the connecting link between the varying forms of the Italian deities above mentioned.

The many and still imperfectly understood changes that were made in the Roman year by successive rulers, have effaced the connexion of that year with the stars which must have originally presided over its opening. But Roman tradition embodied in Virgil’s lines speaks of “the bright Bull” who “with his gilded horns opens the year.”[87] The golden star-tipped horns of the Bull are as we know exactly opposed to the westernmost degrees of Sagittarius; and that constellation, in opposition to the sun, would therefore have marked the opening of just such a vernal year as that alluded to by Virgil. Whether this vernal year before the Julian reformation was still the calendrical year in Rome is, however, very doubtful.

Janus is represented with two heads, sometimes even with four, “to typify the seasons of the year.” The full moon in Sagittarius 4,000 B.C. marked the season of the spring equinox—the sun then being in conjunction with the stars marking the horn tips of the Bull. The new moon in Sagittarius at the same date marked the autumn equinox. The half waning moon in Sagittarius marked the season of the winter solstice: and the half moon of the crescent or waxing moon marked the season of the summer solstice. The four heads of Janus may thus have referred to the four seasons marked by the moon in Sagittarius.

The fact that the Indian archer Rudra (= Siva) and the Grecian archer Artemis, were represented as crowned by the half, not the full moon, would refer these myths to an Indo-Iranian, not to a somewhat later Iranian source. It was not to the reformed Iranian equinoctial year that they pointed, but to the sun’s triumph at the solstitial season. In the Roman Janus myth we may rather detect the later Median influence, and suppose that it referred to a year beginning with the full moon in Sagittarius, a year opening in the spring, when the sun was in conjunction with the “gilded horns” of “the bright Bull.”

All these mythological indications, derived from Median, Assyrian, Indian, and classical sources, though each of them looked at separately may not speak with much insistence, yet considered together seem to point us more and more clearly as we study them, to the fact that about 4,000 B.C. a very important and authoritative observation of the colures (amongst the Zodiacal constellations) was made, and that upon this observation much of the mythology of ancient nations was founded.