reconciled on the assumption that ‘the Bears’ were a she-bear and her two or
three young, and that the Greeks referred only to the mother.^41
But the Latin designation Septentriones may also reflect a very old con-
ception of these stars. Triones were oxen, originally, it would seem, threshing
oxen, who plodded round in a circle trampling the corn or turning a mill-
wheel –– an apt likeness of the constellation that circles round the Pole. The
same picture is attested in India, in the Bha ̄gavata Pura ̄n
̇
a (4. 8), where
Dhruva (‘Fixed’), who is to be transformed into the Pole Star, is told that he
will stand immobile ‘like the mill-post round which the oxen go to thresh
the corn’. He then betakes himself to Vishnu’s seat, the polar axis, round
which the stars go like oxen.^42
In Homer the Bear has the alternative name of the Wagon (Αn μαξα,Il. 18.
487 =Od. 5. 273). Like many Greek names of constellations, this may have
been taken over from Babylonian nomenclature.^43 To be sure, it is paralleled
by Latin Plaustrum and by many designations in European languages, espe-
cially Germanic (Wagen, Wain, etc.).^44 But these may be modelled on the
Latin, and the Latin on the Greek. In any case the shape of the constellation
suggests a wagon more readily than a bear or a group of animals. It may have
been so designated already in Indo-European times; but we cannot infer this
from the agreements.
The name of Sirius, the brightest of the fixed stars, may provide another
Graeco-Aryan link. In the Avesta it is venerated as the star Tisˇtrya, especially
in Yt. 8, which is devoted to it. The Vedic Tis
̇
íya (RV 5. 54. 13; 10. 64. 8) is very
probably the same. Bernhard Forssman derived these forms by dissimilation
from *tri-str-iyo-, ‘belonging to the Tristar’; the ‘Tristar’, he suggested, was the
Belt of Orion, a prominent line of three stars that points down towards Sirius.
Eric Hamp more persuasively understands it of the large equilateral triangle
formed by the bright stars Procyon, Betelgeuse, and Sirius itself, which, as the
(^41) Scherer (1953), 131 f.; id. in Mayrhofer et al. (1974), 187 f. Plurals were probably typical for
Indo-European constellation-names. Scherer sees the Bears as going back to a hunting society,
and he raises the possibility that the Greek Arktouros, the Bear-watcher, is an original part of the
same complex. A. Pârvulescu, JIES 16 (1988), 95–100, maintains that r ́
̇
ks
̇
a ̄h
̇
simply meant ‘stars’
and never the Bear.
(^42) Scherer (1953), 134–6, who notes that a similar conception of the Pole is found among
central Asiatic peoples. O. Szemerényi, Scripta Minora, i (Innsbruck 1987), 53 f. (from a con-
ference paper given in 1961), thinks that Septentriones originally had nothing to do with oxen
but was from *septemsterio ̄n-, ‘seven-star group’; similarly E. Hamp in L. Heilmann (ed.),
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Congress of Linguists (Bologna 1974), 1051, who
explains Old Irish sechtarét‘Arctus’ in the same way. But see C. Watkins, Die Sprache 20 (1974),
11; A. Scherer in Mayrhofer et al. (1974), 187 n. 9.
(^43) West (1997), 29 f. The Akkadian name is ereqqu, ‘Wagon’.
(^44) Material in Grimm (1883–8), 724–6, 1508; A. Scherer (1953), 139–41; A. Pârvulescu, JIES
16 (1988), 102 f.
352 9. Cosmos and Canon