The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

218 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

wicked. Not far off was the hippopotamus, which Brugsch would
identify with Draco; while among other constellations were to be
found the Lion and the Horus-hawk, as well as a warrior armed
with a spear.
All over the world the more prominent stars and constellations
have received names. But it is only the more prominent and
brilliant among them of which this is true. So far as we know,
the only people who have ever systematically mapped out the
heavens, dividing the stars into groups, and giving to each group
a name of its own, were the Babylonians; and it was from
the Babylonians that the constellations as known to Greeks and
[237] Romans, to Hindus, or to Chinese, were ultimately derived. The
inference, therefore, is near at hand, that the primitive Egyptians
also were indebted for their map of the sky to the same source.
And the inference is supported by more than one fact.
On the one side, the names of several of the constellations
were the same among both Babylonians and Egyptians. Of this
the Twins, Aquarius, or the Family, are examples, while it can
hardly be an accident that Orion in both systems of astronomy
is a giant and a hunter.“The Bull of heaven”was a Babylonian
star, and Jupiter bore the Sumerian name of Gudi-bir,“the Bull
of light”; in the Pyramid texts also we have a“Bull of heaven,”
the planet Saturn according to Brugsch, Jupiter according to
Lepsius. Still more striking are the thirty-six Egyptian decans,
the stars who watched for ten days each over the 360 days of
the ancient Egyptian year, and were divided into two classes or
hemispheres, those of the day and those of the night.^191 Not only
did the early Chaldæan year similarly consist of 360 days; it too
was presided over by thirty-six“councillor”stars, half of which
were above the earth, while the other half were below it.^192 Such

(^191) Lepsius, Chronologie der Aegypter, pp. 78, 79. See Brugsch,Die
Aegyptologie, ii. pp. 339-342.
(^192) Hommel,Ausland, 1892, p. 102; Ginzel,Beiträge zur alten Geschichte, i.
pp. 12-15. Diodorus (ii. 30) states that the“councillor gods”were only thirty