later are these relations inverted. From this we may infer that the lunar worship is older than the solar.' We cannot, however, agree with Spiegel when he gives as the reason why darkness attracted the special attention of man, that the sun was to him a matter of course. We see the same story of the lunar religion repeat itself again in the history of the Babylonian-Assyrian religion. Hur-ki (Assyrian Sin) is historically the older and earliest prominent object of worship of the ancient Accadian kingdom; and the further we advance towards the beginnings of the history, the more does the worship of the moon preponderate. The monarchs of the first dynasties regard her as their protector, and the name of the moon often enters into composition to form their proper names.[1] In the later empire, that of Assyria, this prevailing pre-eminence of the moon gradually ceases. She is supplanted by the sun, under whom she descends to be a deity of the second rank, the 'Lord of the thirty days of the month,' and 'Illuminator of the earth.'[2] That Samas, the sun, is called in the Assyrian epic of Istar the son of Sin, the moon-god (IV. 2), 'points,' as the learned German interpreter of the cuneiform inscriptions observes, 'to a veneration of the moon-god in Babylonia earlier than that of the sun-god,'[3] or else to the conception of the night preceding the day. Among the Egyptians, too, it is a later period at which the dominion of the sun is recognised. The older historical epoch—whether permeated, as Bunsen expresses it somewhat obscurely,[4] by a 'cosmogonic-astral' idea, or, as Lenormant describes it in a few bold strokes,[5] possessing very little positive religion at all—knows as yet nothing of solar worship. The solar worship of the Egyptians is undoubtedly the product of a later development of high culture.
- ↑ Compare also the Himyaric proper name Ben Sîn (Halévy, Études sabéenes [Journal Asiat. 1874, II. 543]).
- ↑ Lenormant, Les premières civilisations, II. 158.
- ↑ Schrader, Die Höllenfahrt der Istar, p. 45.
- ↑ Egypt's Place in Universal History, IV. 342.
- ↑ In his essay on the Egyptian antiquities at the Great Exhibition of 1867 at Paris.
