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Updated: June 16, 2025
The attempt has been made by Sayce and others to divide the various names of Ishtar among the aspects of Venus as morning and evening star, but there is no evidence to show that the Babylonians distinguished the one from the other so sharply as to make two goddesses of one and the same planet.
Brown goes on to quote that one of the languages of which we know next to nothing, Hittite, was 'probably allied to Proto-Armenian, and perhaps Lykian, and was above all not Semitic. In any case 'the cuneiform mode of writing was used in Cappadocia at an early period. As even Professor Sayce declines to give more than a tentative reading of a Cappadocian cuneiform inscription, it seems highly rash to seek in this direction for an interpretation of a Homeric word 'moly, used in Cappadocia very many centuries after the tablets were scratched.
At a later period, readings in the works of Renan, Pfleiderer, Cheyne, Harnack, Sayce, and others strengthened me in my liberal tendencies, without diminishing in the slightest my reverence for all that is noble in Christianity, past or present. Another experience, while it did not perhaps set me in any new trains of thought, strengthened me in some of my earlier views.
You find, for example, in looking up your authorities in what has come to be called Egyptology, that while you have Wilkinson's Ancient Egypt, and Lane's Modern Egyptians, both of which are very valuable works, you have not the more modern books of Brugsch-Bey, or of A. H. Sayce, or of Maspero.
The ceremony involved a running of some kind, and reminds one of the running between the two hills Marwa and Safa in Mekka that forms part of the religious observances in connection with a visit to the Kaaba. To connect this word with the Jewish festival of Purim, as Sayce proposes, is wholly unwarranted.
In the cosmogony, Bel is the creator and champion of mankind, and Ea is the subterranean deep which surrounds the earth, the source of wisdom and culture; in the theology, Ea and Bel are pictured in the relation of father and son, who, in concert, are appealed to, when misfortune or disease overtakes the sons of man; Ea, the father, being the personification of knowledge, and Bel, the practical activity that 'emanates from wisdom, as Professor Sayce, adopting the language of Gnosticism, aptly puts it; only that, as already suggested, Marduk assumes the rôle of the older Bel.
From Firan it is held, by Professor Sayce and others, that the main body of the Israelites with their flocks and herds probably passed the Wadi esh-Shekh, while Moses and the elders went by Wadi Selaf and Nakb el-Hawa. The final camping-ground, at which took place the giving of the Law, is supposed to be the Raha plain at the foot of the peak of Jebel Musa.
The reason of the name, with other facts of the old mythology, faded away from the memory of the peasantry of modern Greece; but Athens is a name which must still mean something for them. Accordingly it is not 'Athaevai now, but 'Avthaevai, or the Blooming, on the lips of the peasantry round about; so Mr. Sayce assures us. The same process everywhere meets us.
Marduk appears under a variety of names which will be taken up at their proper place. See Schrader's Assyrisch-Babyl. Hommel's view that Gish-galla, in Gudea's inscriptions, is Babylon lacks convincing evidence, but the city may be as old as Gudea's days for all that. Near Sippar. Bêl matâti. Sayce, Religion of the Ancient Babylonians, pp. 98 seq.; Jensen, Kosmologie der Babylonier, p. 88.
This last fact is the more curious, as Sayce discovered in a passage giving access to a cave near Syracuse some characters somewhat similar in form, to which he assigns a proto-Phoenician origin. We may add that certain characters made out at Cissbury, differing but little from the modern letter B or the figure 6, are also found in the most ancient Palmyrian, Copt, and Syrian alphabets.
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