influence the sun has over them. Jamblichus *[1] records,
that this cross, in the hand of Tot, is the name of the divine Being that travels through the world. Sozomen †[2] thinks it means the life to come, the same with the ineffable image of eternity, Others, strange difference! say it is the phallus, or human genitals, while a later ‡[3] writer maintains it to be the mariner's compass. My opinion, on the contrary is, that, as this figure was exposed to the public for the reason I have mentioned, the Crux Ansata in his hand was nothing else but a monogram of his own name TO, and TT signifying TOT, or as we write Almanack upon a collection published for the same purpose.
The changing of these emblems, and the multitude of them, produced the necessity of contracting their size, and this again a consequential alteration in the original forms; and a stile, or small portable instrument, became all that was necessary for finishing these small Tots, instead of a large graver or carving tool, employed in making the large ones. But men, at last, were so much used to the alteration, as to know it better than under its primitive form, and the engraving became what we may call the first elements, or root, in preference to the original.
The reader will see, that, in my history of the civil wars in Abyssinia, the king, forced by rebellion to retire to the province of Tigré, and being at Axum, found a stone covered with hieroglyphics, which, by the many inquiries I made
- ↑ * Jamblich. de Myst. sect. 8. cap. 5.
- ↑ † Sozomen, Eccles. Hist. lib. 7. cap. 15.
- ↑ ‡ Herw. theolog. Ethnica, p. 11.
- Jamblich. de Myst. sect. 8. cap. 5. † Sozomen, Eccles. Hist. lib. 7. cap. 15.
‡ Herw. theolog. Ethnica, p. 11.
