219
a coincidence cannot have been accidental; the Babylonian and
Egyptian decans must have had the same origin.
But there was yet a further parallelism between the stellar
theology of Egypt and that of Babylonia. In both countries the [238]
worship of the stars passed into an astro-theology. The official
gods were identified with the planets and fixed stars, and the
stellar cult of the people was thus absorbed into the State religion.
But whereas this astro-theology was characteristic of Babylonia,
it has done little more than leave its traces on the historical
religion of Egypt. Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars were identified with
Horus under different forms, and Mercury with Set, while Venus
became“the bark (za)^193 of the phœnix”or soul“of Osiris.”
Sirius was made the star of Isis, Orion the star of Osiris. But, like
the cult of the stars itself, this astro-theology belongs to a far-off
age in Egyptian history. It is the last faint reflection of a phase of
religious thought which had passed away when the monumental
records first begin.
It is the same with a curious echo of ancient Babylonian
cosmology, to which Prof. Hommel has drawn our attention. The
old Babylonian Epic of the Creation begins with the words—
“At that time the heaven above was not known by name,
the earth beneath was not named,
in the beginning the deep was their generator,
the chaos of the sea was the mother of them all.”in number; but the list of planetary stations discovered by Hommel inWAI.
v. 46, shows that the text must be corrected into thirty-six. Indeed, Diodorus
himself adds that every ten days there was a change of constellation, so that in
a year of 360 days there must have been thirty-six constellations in all.
(^193) The Egyptianzais the Semiticìi,“ship,”from which it seems to have been
borrowed.