The Water Snake
They call it Hydra like a living creature.
'Tis long drawn out. His head moves on below
The midst of the Crab; his length below the Lion,
His tail hangs o'er the Centaur's self.
Frothingham's Aratos.
Burritt's chart represents Hydra as bearing on his coils, as he draws himself along the sky, a Cup, and two birds, the Crow and the Owl, the latter being a recently added asterism. His fierce head and extended fangs seem dangerously close to the Lesser Dog, while the Crab, just above him, lies in wait to seize him in its vice-like claws.
Hydra is supposed to be the snake shown on a uranographic stone from the Euphrates of 1200 b.c., "identified with the source of the fountains of the great deep," and one of the several sky symbols of the great dragon Tiamat. On one of the Euphratean boundary stones, those most ancient records of early times, the figures of the Water Snake and the Scorpion appear side by side.
Brown claims that Hydra is a variant reduplication of Cetus, the storm and ocean monster attacked by the sun-god, and in an ancient Akkadian hymn it is referred to as bearing the yoke on its seven heads.
The ancients perceived an analogy between a quick flowing river, and the swift gliding of a huge glistening serpent, and so, as Maunder says, we arrive at the idea of the River of the Snake, which develops into an ocean stream. The Egyptians at one time regarded this constellation as the
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