10 F. Arago, Astronomie populaire, IV, 204. ll Isaiah 37 : 9.
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Assyria went to Egypt. They fled before a great storm." 1S An army as disciplined as the Assyrian army under one of its famous kings would not have run away from a cloudburst. The event mentioned in this inscription suggested to its modern publisher that the scriptural story of a blast that destroyed the Assyrian host refers, not to Sennacherib's army, but to that of his successor-son; otherwise one must think that on two similar occasions a natural cause subdued the Assyrian army. However, it is probable that after the army of Sennacherib was annihilated, violent atmospheric discharges and some portents in the sky, so numerous in those years, threw the Assyrian troops into a panic so that they fled.
robin-bobin
The trembling earth, the displacement of the poles, the change in the climate, the frightening prodigies in the sky, caused great movements of peoples. The Aztecs changed their homeland.
"These Mexicans carried with them an idol which they called Huitzilo-pochtli. . . . They asserted that this idol commanded them to leave their country, promising to make them lords and masters of all the lands . . . which abounded with gold, silver, feathers . . . and all the things necessary for life. The Mexicans departed like the children of Israel in their search of a promised land." 13 In India the patron of the invading Aryan race was Indra, the god of war, the Hindu Mars.
The Ionians and Dorians spread to the islands, the Latins were pressed by newcomers to the Apennine Peninsula, the Cimmerians wandered from Europe across the Bosporus into Asia Minor, the Scythians crossed the Caucasus into Asia.
Synodos
We remember that Josephus Flavius, after giving Herodotus' account of the destruction of Sennacherib's army, intended to quote a divergent account of Berosus, and introduced it with the words, "Here is what wrote Berosus," but the account is not preserved.
12 Sidney Smith, Babylonian Historical Texts (1924), p. 5.
13 Manuscrit Ramirez (of the 16th century) translated by D. Charnay, Histoire de Vorigine des Indiens qui habitent la Nouvelle Espagne selon leurs traditions (1903), p. 9.
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Now, if we know what happened on the night of March 23, —687, are we not able to find out what the missing account of Berosus was?
We can assume that Berosus knew that the catastrophe was caused by a planet in contact with the earth. Seneca, in his work, Naturales quaestiones, described the cataclysms of water and fire that visited this world and brought it to the brink of destruction. He also presented the opinion of Berosus, which is remarkable in that it reflects ancient knowledge similar to that at which we arrived after a long series of deductions and conclusions. Seneca wrote: "Berosus, the translator of Bel, attributed to the planets the cause of these perturbations." And he added: "His certainty in this matter was so great as to fix the dates of the universal conflagration and deluge. Everything terrestrial, he says, will be burned, when the stars which now follow different orbits will reunite in the sign of Cancer, and will place themselves in one line, so that a straight line would pass through the centers of all these globes. The deluge will come when the same planets will have conjunction in Capricorn." 1
Disregarding the specific details of this assumption, there still remains a kernel of truth. The catastrophes of flood and of conflagration were ascribed to the influence of planets, and the conjunction was called the fatal moment. Such being the opinion of Berosus on the cause of the world catastrophes, the catastrophe that befell Sennacherib was probably explained by him in the same way. We are thus able to reconstruct Berosus' record which was omitted in Josephus.
Chaldean scholars were aware that the planetary system is not rigid and that the planets undergo changes. We find in Diodorus of Sicily: "Each of the planets, according to them [the Chaldeans]
has its own particular course, and its velocities and periods of time are subject to change and variation." 2 They counted the earth among the planets, for Diodorus wrote that the Chaldeans stated "that the
1 The same idea, but with varying positions of the stars as the cause of the catastrophes, is found in Nigidius, quoted by Lucan, and in Olvmpiodor, Commentary to Aristotle. See Boll, Sternglaube, p. 201, and idem, Sphaera, p. 362; Gennadius (George Scholarius, patriarch at Constantinople), Dialogus Christiani cum Judaeo (1464). A French edition of the works of Gennadius was printed in 1930.
2 Diodorus of Sicily, The Library of History ii. 31 (transl. Oldfather).
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moon's light is reflected and her eclipses are due to the shadow of the earth." 3 This implies that they knew the earth is a sphere in space, a fact known also to a number of Greek philosophers.4
robin-bobin
A few Greek philosophers were aware that planets, on close contact, are greatly disturbed, and that out of their agitated atmospheres comets are born. The perturbations in such contacts may be so strong that, when the earth is involved, deluge or world conflagration may take place.
Zeno, the founder of the Stoic school of thought, 5 and likewise Anaxagoras (-500 to -428) and Democritus (-460 to -320), declared that planets at conjunction may become coalescent, thus taking the form of comets. Aristotle, who misunderstood their teaching, declared: "We have ourselves observed Jupiter coinciding with one of the stars of the Twain and hiding it, and yet no comet was formed." 6
Diogenes Laertius recorded that Anaxagoras thought that comets are "a conjunction of planets which emit flames" 7; and Seneca, without naming Anaxagoras and Democritus, wrote: "Here is the explanation which is given by some ancient authors. When a planet enters in conjunction with another, they confound their lights into one light, and they have the appearance of an elongated star. . . . The interval which separates them is illuminated by both of them, inflames and transforms into a trail of fire." 8 Seneca, who regarded this as an explanation of the nature of comets, questioned it, reasoning that "planets cannot remain for a long time in conjunctions, because by necessity of the law of velocity they would separate."
Plato, on the authority of the Egyptian sages, ascribed the deluge and conflagration of the world to the action of a celestial body that, changing its path, passed close by the earth, and he even pointed to the planets as the cause of periodic world catastrophes.9 The Greek s Ibid. 4 Aristarchus of Samos recognized that the earth revolves together with other planets around the sun. B Seneca De Cometis.
6 Aristotle Meteorologica i. 6 (transl. E. W. Webster, 1931).
7 Diogenes Laertius, Lives, "Life of Anaxagoras." 8 Seneca De cometis. 9 Plato Timaeus 22C, 39D.
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term for the collision of planets is synodos, which, in the words of a modern interpreter, requires a meeting in space and also a collision of planets.10
The Romans knew that the earth is one of the planets; Pliny, for instance, wrote: "Human beings are distributed all around the earth and stand with their feet pointing toward each other. . . .
Another marvel, that the earth herself hangs suspended and does not fall and carry us with it." n The earth, one of the planets, had been subject to conflicts with other planets, and traces of knowledge of these occurrences may be found in the early writers. Origen writing against Celsus stated: "We do not refer either the deluge or the conflagration to the cycles and planetary periods; but the cause of them we declare to be the extensive prevalence of wickedness, and its (consequent) removal by a deluge or a conflagration." 12 Celsus and Origen were familiar with the view that the deluge and the world conflagration were caused by planets, and that these world catastrophes could be calculated in advance.
Pliny wrote: "Most men are not acquainted with a truth known to the founders of the science from their arduous study of the heavens," namely, that thunderbolts "are the fires of the three upper planets." 13 He differentiated them from lightning caused by the dashing together of two clouds. Seneca, his contemporary, also distinguished lightnings that "seek houses" or "lesser bolts" and the bolts of Jupiter "by which the threefold mass of mountains fell." 14
A vivid picture of an interplanetary discharge is given by Pliny: "Heavenly fire is spit forth by the planet as crackling charcoal flies from a burning log." 15 If such a discharge falls on the earth, "it is
10 Boll, Sternglmihe, pp. 93 and 201. The Greek term "requires a meeting in the same horizontal and vertical planes and a collision. The planets thrust one another and cause the destruction of the world" ("ein Zusammentreffen und auch ein Zusammenstossen auf derselben Ebene, also nach Breite und Hohe stossen die Planeten ineinander und losen dadurch das Weltende aus").
11 Pliny, Natural History, ii. 45.
i2 Origen, Against Celsus, Bk. iv, Chap, xii, in Vol. IV of The Ante-Nicene Fathers robin-bobin
(ed. A. Robert and J. Donaldson, 1890).
13 Pliny, Natural History, ii. 18. 14 Seneca, Thyestes. 15 Pliny, ii. 18.
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accompanied by a very great disturbance of the air," produced "by the birth-pangs, so to speak, of the planet in travail." 16
Pliny says also that a bolt from Mars fell on Bolsena, "the richest town in Tuscany," and that the city was entirely burned up by this bolt.17 He refers to Tuscan writings as the source of his information. By Tuscan writings are meant Etruscan books.
Bolsena, or the ancient Volsinium, was one of the chief cities of the Etruscans, the people whose civilization preceded that of the Latin Romans on the Apennine Peninsula. The Etruscan states occupied the area of what was later known as Tuscany, between the Tiber and the Arno.
Near Bolsena, or Volsinium, is a lake of the same name. This lake fills a basin nine miles long, seven miles wide, and 285 feet deep. For a long time this basin was regarded as the water-filled crater of a volcano. However, its area of 117 square kilometers exceeds by far that of the largest known craters on the earth—those in the Andes in South America and those in the Hawaiian (Sandwich) Islands in the Pacific. Hence, the idea that the lake is the crater of an extinct volcano has recently been questioned. Moreover, although the bottom of the lake is of lava, and the ground around the lake abounds with ashes and lava and columns of basalt, the talus of a volcano is lacking.
Taking what Pliny said of an interplanetary discharge together with what has actually been found at Volsinium, one may wonder whether the cinders and the lava and the columns of basalt could possibly be the remains of the contact Pliny mentions. Again, if the discharge was caused by Mars, it would probably have occurred in the eighth pre-Christian century. The catastrophes of that century brought the great Etruscan civilization into sudden decline and launched the migration of newcomers to Italy leading to the founding of Rome. The Etruscans, as cited by Censorinus and quoted in the Section on "The World Ages," thought that celestial prodigies augured the end of each age. "The Etruscans were versed in the science of the stars, and after having observed the prodigies with attention, they recorded these observations in their books."
is ibid. " Ibid., ii. 53.
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The Stormer of the Walls
Following the upheavals in which, in the words of the Babylonians, Mars-Nergal "moved the earth off its hinges," and, in the words of Isaiah, "the earth moved exceedingly" and was
"removed out of her place," mighty and repeated earthquakes devastated whole countries, destroyed cities, and shattered the walls of strongholds. "Bloodstained stormer of walls" is the ever repeated epithet of Ares in Homer. Hesiod, too, calls Ares "sacker of towns."* "Behold,"
said Amos, "the Lord commandeth, and he will smite the great house with breaches [into pieces]." Then came the "commotion" of the days of Uzziah, and of the days of Ahaz, and of the days of Hezekiah, when "the bricks are fallen down" (Isaiah 9 :10) and only "a very small remnant" of the people remained (Isaiah 1:9). Those were days of "trouble, and of treading down, and of perplexity by the Lord God of Hosts" and "breaking down the walls" (Isaiah 22 : 5).
Recurrent displacement of the terrestrial globe, torsion of the litho-sphere, and migration of the inner parts of the globe must have caused a succession of earthquakes over a prolonged period.
But in comparison with the great catastrophes, when "heaven reeled," the local earthquakes received only slight attention.
In the reports of the astrologers of Nineveh and Babylon, earthquakes are often mentioned in just a single line, as in the following message: "Last night there was an earthquake." The frequent trembling of the earth became a source of omens for the magicians, which were reduced to formulas: "When the earth quakes in the month of Shevat," or "When the earth quakes in the month of Nisan," then one or another event will take place. As in the following sentence, the robin-bobin
observation could be basically correct: "When the earth quakes through the whole day, there will be a destruction of the land. When it quakes continually, there will be an invasion of the enemy."
2
Reports concerning earthquakes in Mesopotamia in the eighth and
1 Hesiod, Theogony, 11. 935 S. Purandara or "town destroying" is the usual appellative of Indra.
2 R. C. Thompson (ed.), The Reports of the Magicians and Astrologers of Nineveh and Babylon in the British Museum (1900), Vol. II, Nos. 263, 265.
»
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seventh centuries are very numerous, and they are dated.3 Nothing comparable is known in modern times. In some of these reports, Nergal (Mars) is mentioned as the cause of the calamity.
"The earth shook; a collapsing catastrophe was all over the country; Nergal strangles the country."4 Temples constructed with great care, so that the foundations might absorb shocks and resist them, were often destroyed by the catastrophes, and the cause was again the planet Nergal.
Thus Nergal is referred to in connection with the collapse of the temple in Nippur that was destroyed in an earthquake.5
The kings of Babylon, the successors to Sennacherib, record im many inscriptions the repairing of breaches in the palaces and temples of the land. Sometimes the same temples or palaces were repaired by two kings in close succession, as in the case of Nergilissar (Neriglissar) and Nebuchadnezzar.8 In the great catastrophes of the eighth to the seventh centuries, practically no structure escaped damage, and new buildings were erected so as to absorb frequent shocks. At the close of the seventh century, Nebuchadnezzar described the precautions taken in placing the foundations of the palaces "on the breast of the netherworld"; these foundations of large stones with joints fitting one into the other have been unearthed in excavations.7 The Babylonians also found that walls of burnt bricks were of greater elasticity than walls of stones; they were built on foundations of great blocks of stone.8
These ever recurrent earthshocks in a country as rich in oil as Mesopotamia also caused eruptions of earth deposits: "The earth threw oil and asphalt," observed the official astrologers, as the effect of an earthquake.9
3 See Kugler, Babylonische Zeitordnung, p. 116. 4 Ibid.
5 Langdon, Sumerian and Babylonian Psalms, p. 99.
• See the Section "Mars Moves the Earth from Its Pivot," note 6.
7 R. Koldeway, The Excavations at Babylon (1914); idem, Das wieder entstan-dene Babylon (4th ed., 1925).
8 Koldeway, Die Konigsburgen von Babylon (1931-1939), Vols. I and II. Cf. Pliny, ii. 84: "The solidly built portion of the city being specially liable to collapses of this nature . . . walls built of clay bricks suffer less damage front being shaken."
9 Kugler, Babylonische Zeitordnung, p. 117.
«
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The Scriptures and the rabbinical sources record repeatedly the repairing of breaches in the House of the Lord. On the day of the "commotion" of Uzziah the temple suffered a great breach.10 References to breaches in houses, large palaces, and small dwellings are very numerous in the prophets of the eighth century. Isaiah speaks of "breaches of the city of David that they are many." u Repair of breaches in the Temple was the permanent concern of the kings of Jerusalem, also "the wall that was broken" of the city's outer bulwark.12
Since in modern times earthquakes occur only very seldom in Palestine, the frequent reference of the prophets and psalmists to them caused perplexity: "The earthquake held a place in the religious conceptions of the Israelites quite out of proportion to its slight and relatively rare occurrence in Palestine." 13
Troy, the scene of the Homeric epos, was destroyed by an earthquake. The famous "sixth city" at Hissarlik, recognized as the fortress of Priam, king of the Trojans, fell because of earthshocks, a robin-bobin
fact established in the excavation by the archaeological expedition of the University of Cincinnati.14
There are a number of theories concerning the cause of the earthquakes, but none of them is generally accepted. One connects the cause of earthquakes with the process of mountain building. Mountains are supposed to have their origin in the cooling of the earth and contraction of its crust.15 This theory is based on the assumption that originally the earth was liquid. The folding of the crust creates mountains and causes earthquakes.
Another theory sees the cause of earthquakes in the migration of
10 Josephus, Antiquities, IX. x. 4. See Ginzberg, Legends, VI, 358.
« Isaiah 22 : 9.
12 II Kings 12 : 5; 22 : 5; II Chronicles 32 : 5; Amos 6 : 11; 9 : 11.
x3 A. Lods, Israel: From Its Beginnings to the Middle of the Eighth Century (transl. S. H. Hooke, 1932), p. 31.
14 C. W. Blegen, "Excavation at Troy," American loumal of Archaeology, XXXIX (1935), 17.
15 See the discussion of the problem of mountain building in the Section "The Planet Earth."
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land masses, even of entire continents. This theory, too, is based on the concept of a thin crust resting on a viscous substratum. Geological and faunal similarities of South America and West Africa suggested their separation in recent geological times, and their migration in opposite directions. According to this theory, thermal convection is the mechanical cause of this migration, with magma supplying the heat.
Still another theory supposes that there are great mountains and deep valleys on the inner surface of the crust, facing the magma. The sliding of huge rocks along these mountainous slopes under the pull of gravity is presumed to be the cause of earthquakes.
The mountainous western coast of North and South America, or the shore of the Cordilleras, and the eastern coast of Asia stretching into the East Indies form the area of greatest earthquake activity, with 80 per cent of the entire mechanical force released in earthquakes concentrated there. Another area stretches from the Mediterranean toward the highland of Asia.
In an attempt to find the relation of earthquakes to other natural phenomena, a statistical investigation of the earthquakes of the middle of the nineteenth century was conducted, and the results suggested that earthquakes are more numerous when the moon is new and again when it is full, or when the pull of the moon acts in the same direction as the pull of the sun or when it acts in the opposite direction. The time when the moon is in perigee, or closest to the earth, was also found to be favorable for earthquakes.16 These observations were challenged as to their general validity.
However, mountain building is a process the causes of which have not been established; the migration of continents is but a hypothesis; and the crumbling of the earth's crust must have some additional cause besides the force of gravity, because this force was active when the crust was built and made possible the formation of the crust in its present shape. Hence, all these theories are only hypotheses about unknown causes of known phenomena.
On the basis of the material offered in the foregoing pages, the assumption is made here that earthquakes result from torsion of the 16 Cf. the scientific publications of A. Perrey.
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crust following a change in the position of the equator and the displacement of matter inside the globe caused by the direct attraction of a cosmic body when in a close contact. Pull, torsion, and displacement were responsible for mountain building, too.
If this conception of the causes of earthquakes is correct, then there must have been fewer and fewer earthquakes during the course of time since the last cosmic catastrophe. The regions of the Apennine Peninsula, the eastern Mediterranean, and Mesopotamia, for which we have reliable records, can be compared in this respect with the same regions of today.
robin-bobin
Earthquakes in Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome are described or mentioned by many classic authors. For the purpose of comparison with the earth-tremor activity of the present day, it is enough to point to fifty-seven earthquakes reported in Rome in a single year17 during the Punic wars (—217).
If our interpretation of the cause of earthquakes is correct, then not only must more tremors and stronger shocks have been experienced in olden times, but also their cause must have been known to the ancients.
Pliny wrote: 'The theory of the Babylonians deems that even earthquakes and fissures in the ground are caused by the force of the stars that is the cause of all other phenomena, but only by that of those three stars (planets) to which they assign thunderbolts."18
" Pliny ii. 86. i» Pliny u. 81.
CHAPTER 5
The Steeds of Mars
' I 'HE CASE of Abraham Rockenbach and David Herlicius, who * wrote about the year 1600, and who were informed on the matter of the comets of antiquity,1 shows that the contents of some old manuscripts were known to the scholarly world then, though not to modent scholars.
A scholar and pamphleteer, Jonathan Swift, in his Gulliver's Travels (1726), wrote that the planet Mars had two satellites, very small ones. "Certain astrologers . . . have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve about Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the center of the primary planet exactly three of its diameters, and the outermost five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half . . . which evidently shews them to be governed by the same law of gravitation, that influences the other heavenly bodies."2
Actually Mars has two satellites, mere rocks, one being as small as about ten (?) miles in diameter, the other only five (?) miles.8 One travels around Mars in 7 hours 39 minutes, the other in 30 hours 18 minutes. Their distance from the center of Mars is even less than Swift said it was.4 They were discovered by Asaph Hall in 1877. With
1 See the Section, "The Comet of Typhon."
2 Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver (London, 1726), 11,43.
3 The diameters of these satellites are not exactly known (Russell, Dugan and Stewart, 1945).
4 Phobos is distant from the planet's surface less than one diameter of the planet (from the planet's center less than one and a half diameters of the planet).
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the optical instruments of the days of Swift, they could not have been seen, and neither Newton nor Halley, the contemporaries of Swift, nor William Herschel in the eighteenth or Leverrier in the nineteenth century suspected their existence.5 It was bold of Swift to assume their very short periods of revolution (months), measured only in hours; it was a very rare coincidence, indeed, if Swift invented these satellites, guessing correctly not only their existence, but also their number (two), and especially their very short revolutions. This passage of Swift aroused the literary critics' wonder.
It is an even chance that Swift invented the two satellites of Mars and thus by a rare accident came close to the truth. But it may also have been that Swift had read about the trabants in some text not known to us or to his contemporaries. The fact is that Homer knew about the "two steeds of Mars" that drew his chariot; Virgil also wrote about them.6
When Mars was very close to the earth, its two trabants were visible. They rushed in front of and around Mars; in the disturbances that took place, they probably snatched some of Mars'
atmosphere, dispersed as it was, and appeared with gleaming manes.7 The steeds were yoked when Mars (Ares) prepared to descend to the earth on a punitive expedition.
robin-bobin
When Asaph Hall discovered the satellites, he gave them the names of Phobos (Terror) and Deimos (Rout), the two steeds of Mars; 8 without fully realizing what he did, he gave the satellites the same names by which they were known to the ancients.
Whether or not Swift borrowed his knowledge of the existence of two trabants of Mars from some ancient astrological work, the ancient poets knew of the existence of the satellites of Mars.
6 Leverrier died one month after Asaph Hall made his discovery.
• Iliad xv. 119; Georgics iii. 91. Horses were sacrificed to Mars (Plutarch, Roman Questions, xcvii) either because they are animals employed in war, or because af the trabants of Mars which looked like horses drawing a chariot.
7 G. A. Atwater suggests that these might have been electrical effects.
8 Asaph Hall, The Satellites of Mars (1878): "Of the various names that have bemi proposed for these satellites, I have chosen those suggested by Mr. Madan of Eton, England," Deimos and Phobos.
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The Terrible Ones
Venus had a tail, considerably shortened since the time it was a comet, but still long enough to give the impression of a hanging flame, or smoke, or attached hair. When Mars clashed with Venus, asteroids,1 meteorites, and gases were torn from this trailing part, and began a semi-independent existence, some following the orbit of Mars, some other paths.
These swarms of meteorites with their gaseous appendages were newborn comets; flying in bands and taking various shapes, they made an uncanny impression. Those which followed Mars closely looked like a troop following their leader. They also ran along different orbits, grew quickly from small to giant size, and terrorized the peoples of the earth. And when, soon after the impact of Venus and Mars, Mars began to threaten the earth, the new comets, running very close to the earth, added to the terror, continually recalling the hour of peril.
Ares of Homer, going into battle, is accompanied by never resting horrible creatures, Terror, Rout, and Discord. Terror and Rout yoke the gleaming horses of Ares, themselves dreadful beasts, also known by these names; Discord, "sister and comrade of man-slaying Ares, rageth incessantly; she at the first rears her crest but little, yet thereafter planteth her head in heaven, while her feet tread on earth."
Similarly, the Babylonians saw the planet Mars-Nergal in the company of demons, and wrote in their hymns to Nergal: 2 "Great giants, raging demons, with awesome members, run at his right and at his left." These "raging demons" are pictured also in the Nergal-Eriskigal poem; 3 they bring pestilence and cause earthquakes.
It appears that the mythological figures of the Furies of the Latins or the Erinyes of the Greeks, with serpents winding about their heads
1 Between Mars and Jupiter are over a thousand asteroids that have been thought to have once been a planet. G. A. Atwater queries whether they could have resulted from the encounter between Mars and Venus.
2 Bollenrucher, Gebete und Hymnen an Nergal, p. 29.
3 Fragments of this poem were found presumably at el-Amarna. It is very likely that the Ethiopians, who subdued Egypt in the eighth century, occupied Akhet-Aten (Tell-el-Amarna), and that some parts of the archives may have been deposited by them.
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and arms, flashing flame with their eyes, swinging torches around like wheels, grew out of the same prodigies which moved rapidly, changed their forms hourly, and acted violently. The Erinyes traveled in a group, like huntresses or like a "pack of savage hounds," 4 but sometimes they appeared to be split into two groups.5
robin-bobin
To these comets, traveling in bands with Mars or Indra, are dedicated many Vedic hymns, indeed a great part of them. They are called Maruts "shining like snakes," "blazing in their strength,"
"brilliant like fires." •
O Indra, O strong hero, grant thou glory to us with the Maruts, terrible with the terrible ones, strong and giver of victory.7
And it is said that their "strength is like the vigor of their father."
Your march, O Maruts, appears brilliant. . . .
We invoke you, the great Maruts,
the constant wanderers. . . .
Like the dawn, they uncover the dark nights
with red rays, the strong ones,
with their brilliant light,
as with a sea of milk. . . .
Streaming down with rushing splendor,
they have assumed their bright and brilliant color.8
Stones were hurled by these comets.
You the powerful, who shine with your spears, shaking even what is unshakable by strength . . .
Hurling the stone in the flight! . . . All beings are afraid of the Maruts.9
May your march be brilliant, O Maruts . . .
Shining like snakes.
May that straightforward shaft of yours, O Maruts,
bounteous givers, be far from us,
and far the stone which you hurl! 10
* J. Geffcken, "Eumenides, Erinyes" in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. J. Hastings, Vol. V.
* Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris, 1. 968; Aeschylus, Eumenides.
* Vedic Hymns (transl. F. Max Miiller, 1891). 7 Ibid., Mandala I, Hymn 171.
* Ibid., Hymn 172. • Ibid., Hymn 85. 10 Ibid., Hymn 172.
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Meteorites, when entering the earth's atmosphere, make a frightful din. So did the Maruts: Even by day the Maruts create darkness. . . . Then from the shouting of the Maruts over the whole space of the Earth, men reeled forward.11
This darkness and this din were narrated in scriptural and rabbinical sources, in Roman traditions, and in hymns to Nergal. As the similarity of the description of the "terrible ones" in the Vedic hymns and in Joel is striking, but has not been noticed, a few more quotations should follow here.
The comets, just beginning to whirl, looked like revolving torches or writhing snakes; they assumed the form of spinning wheels, and the celestial phantasmagoria appeared like swift chariots; changing their forms, the Maruts looked like horses racing along the sky, and then again like a host of warriors, leaping, climbing, irresistible.
The verses of the second chapter of Joel (2 : 2-11) are given in their order, interspersed with verses taken from a number of Vedic hymns dedicated to the Maruts.
Joel 2:2 A day of darkness and of gloominess,
a day of clouds and of thick darkness, as the morning spread upon the mountains: a great people and a strong; there hath not been ever the like, neither shall be any more after it, even to the years of many generations.
Vedic Hymns Even by day the Maruts create darkness.12 The terrible Marut-host of ever-youthful heroes.13 All beings are afraid of the Maruts: they are men terrible to behold, like kings.14
Joel 2:3 A fire devoureth before them;
and behind them a flame burneth. . . . Nothing shall escape them.
" Ibid., Hymn 48. 12 Ibid., Hymn 38. «Ibid., Mandala V, Hymn 53, robin-bobin
i« Ibid., Mandala I, Hymn 85.
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Vedic Hymns Like a blast of fire. . . .
Blazing in their strength, brilliant like fires, and impetuous.15
Joel 2 : 4 The appearance of them
is as the appearance of horses: and as horsemen, so shall they run.
Vedic Hymns At their racings, the earth shakes, as if broken,
when on the heavenly path they harness for victory.
They wash their horses like racers in the courses, they hasten with the points of the reed on their quick steeds.16
Joel 2 : 5 Like the noise of chariots on the tops of mountains
shall they leap, like the noise of a flame of fire that devoureth the stubble, as a strong people set in battle array.
Vedic Hymns They are like headlong charioteers on their ways.
They who are brilliant, of terrible design, powerful, and devourers of foes.
On your chariots charged with lightning . . .
Host of your chariots, terrible Marut host.17
Joel 2 : 6 Before their face the people shall be much pained:
all faces shall gather blackness.
Vedic Hymns At your approach the son of man holds himself down. . . . You have caused men to tremble, you have caused mountains to tremble.18
Joel 2 : 7 They shall run like mighty men;
they shall climb the wall like men of war; and they shall march every one on his ways, and they shall not break their ranks.
is Ibid., Hymns 39, 172. " Ibid., Hymns 86, 172.
" Ibid., Hymns 172, 19, 36; Mandala V, Hymn 53. J8 Ibid., Mandala I, Hymn 37.
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Vedic Hymns Your conquest is violent, splendid, terrible, full and crushing. . . . The terrible train of untiring Maruts. . . . Full of terrible designs, like giants.19
Joel describes how these warriors, coming with fire and clouds, will run upon the wall, enter in at the windows, run to and fro in the city, and the sword can do them no harm. In similar terms the Vedic hymns describe the conquest by this terrible host.
If there is any doubt as to the nature of the "terrible ones," the following words should dissipate it:
Joel 2 : 10 The earth shall quake before them;
the heavens shall tremble; the sun and the moon shall be dark, and the stars shall withdraw their shining.
Maruts are often called "shakers of heaven and earth." Vedic Hymns You shake the sky.
The terrible ones . . . even what is firm and unshakable is being shaken.
When they whose march is terrible have caused the rocks to tremble,
or when the manly Maruts have shaken the back of heaven.
Hide the hideous darkness,
make the light which we long for! 20
The earth groaned, the meteorites—the host of the Lord—filled the sky with a battle cry "over the whole space of the Earth," and "men reeled forward."
These were, in Joel's words, the "wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke," when the "sun is turned into darkness, and the moon into blood."
The clouds, the fire, the terrifying din, the darkness in the middle of the day; the fantastic figures on the sky of speeding chariots, run-'* Ibid., Hymns 168, 64. 20 ibid., Hymns 168, 167, 106, 38, 86.
286 ' WORLDS IN COLLISION
robin-bobin
ning horses, marching warriors; the trembling of the earth, the reeling of the firmament, were visualized, felt, and feared on the shores of both the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, for they were not local disturbances, but displays of cosmic forces in cosmic dimensions. Joel did not copy from the Vedas nor the Vedas from Joel. In more than this one instance it is possible to show that peoples, separated even by broad oceans, have described some spectacle in similar terms. These were pageants, projected against the celestial screen, that, a few hours after they were seen in India, appeared over Nineveh, Jerusalem, and Athens, shortly thereafter over Rome and Scandinavia, and a few hours later over the lands of the Mayas and Incas.
The spectators saw in the celestial prodigies either demons, as the Erinyes of the Greeks or the Furies of the Latins, or gods whom they invoked in prayers, as in the Vedas of the Hindus, or the executors of the Lord's wrath, as in Joel and Isaiah.
In the Section "Isaiah" we maintained that the army of the Lord was not the Assyrian host, but a celestial host. Isaiah called the army of the Most High "the terrible ones."
And he will lift up an ensign to the nations from far,
and will hiss unto them from the end of the earth:
and, behold, they shall come with speed swiftly:
None shall be weary nor stumble among them;
none shall slumber nor sleep;
neither shall the girdle of their loins be loosed,
nor the latchet of their shoes be broken:
Whose arrows are sharp, and all their bows bent,
their horses' hoofs shall be counted like flint,
and their wheels like a whirlwind.
Their roaring shall be like a lion . . .
they shall roar like young lions . . .
like the roaring of the sea:
and if one look unto the land,
behold darkness and sorrow;
and the light is darkened in the heavens thereof.21
21 Isaiah 5 : 26 ff.
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287
The mighty roaring, the wheels revolving like a whirlwind, the horses with hoofs of flint, the light darkened in heaven are once more common features.
Vedic Hymns These strong, manly, strong armed Maruts do not strive among themselves; firm are the horns, the weapons on your chariot, and on your faces are splendours.22
They who by their own might
seem to have risen above heaven and earth . . .
they are glorious like brilliant heroes,
they shine forth like foe-destroying youths.23
They who are roaring and hasting like winds,
brilliant like the tongues of fire,
powerful like mailed soldiers . . .
who hold together like the spokes of chariot-wheels,
who glance forward like victorious heroes,
who are swift, like the best of horses.24
The dreadful figures scattered a hail of meteorites that bombarded walls with hot gravel and flew into windows; simultaneously cities were turned into heaps by the leaping ground.
"The multitude of the terrible ones" is "like small dust," their invasion "shall be at an instant suddenly," says Isaiah.25 The Lord shall send his host "with thunder, and with earthquake, and great noise, with storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire."
robin-bobin
These Maruts are men brilliant with lightning, they shoot with thunderbolts, they blaze with the wind, they shake the mountains.28
Isaiah (25 : 4) says that "the blast of the terrible ones is as a storm against the wall."
Thou [the Lord] shalt bring down the noise of strangers . . . the branch of the terrible ones shall be brought low.27
22 Mandala VIII, Hymn 20. 23 Mandala X, Hymn 77.
24 Ibid., Hymn 78. 25 isaiah 29 : 5.
26 Vedic Hymns, Mandala V, Hymn 54. 27 Isaiah 25 : 5.
288
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The Maruts are often called "the terrible ones," the same term Isaiah used. "The terrible ones" of the Vedas were not common storm clouds, nor were the "terrible ones" of Joel and Isaiah human beings. Certainly only by chance did the similarity of names and pictures in the Vedas and the Prophets escape the attention of students of religion.
The Maruts are understood here as comets which in great numbers started to whirl in the sky on short orbits, after the impact of Mars and Venus. They followed and preceded the planet Mars.
The name Mars (genitive, Martis) would be of the same origin as Marut. It is therefore gratifying to read that the philological relation has already been established.28 It is even more satisfactory that this philological equation was made without knowledge of the actual relation between the planet Mars and "the terrible ones."
By comparing Hebrew historical, Chinese astronomical, and Latin ecclesiastical material, we have established that it was the planet Mars which caused a series of catastrophes in the eighth and seventh centuries before this era. The Greek epos explained how it happened that Venus ceased and Mars began to be a threat to the earth. In heavenly battles, Ares or Nergal, both known as the planet Mars, had an entourage of demoniac figures. The name Mars is derived from the Indian Marut; Maruts, "the terrible ones," are "the terrible ones" of Isaiah and Joel.
The origin of the Greek name Ares was debated by philologists,29 and reasons against a common root with the identical Mars were admitted. It seems to me that just as Mars is derived from Marut, "the terrible ones" of the Vedas, so Ares was formed from the "terrible one" of the Hebrew, which, as used by Joel and Isaiah, is ariz.
In a no longer extant passage of Pliny there was something said about comets being produced by planets.30 Also the Soochow Chart
28 "Why should we object to Mars, Martis as a parallel form of Maruts? I do not say the two words are identical, I only maintain that the root is the same. . . . If there could be any doubt as to the original identity of Marut and Mars, it is dispelled by the Umbrian name cerfo Martio, which, as Grassmann (Kuhn's Zeitschrift, XVI, 190, etc.) has shown, corresponds exactly to the expression sardha-s maruta-s, the host of the Maruts. Such minute coincidences can hardly be accidental." F. Max Miiller, Vedic Hymns (1891), I, xxv. » Ibid., p. xxvi. so Cf. Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopadie, Vol. XI, Col. 1156.
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refers to occasions in the past when comets were born from planets, from Mars, Venus, and others.
Samples from the Planets
In the Vedic hymns the Maruts are implored to "be far from us and far the stone which you hurl."
When comets pass close to the earth, stones occasionally fall; the classic case is that of the meteorite that fell at Aegospotami when a comet shone in the sky.1 The Hindu book of Varahasanhita sees in the meteorites portents of devastation by fire and earthquake.2
Since the planets were gods, stones hurled by them or by the comets created in their encounters, were feared as divine missiles,3 and when they fell and were found, they were worshiped.
The stone of Cronus at Delphi,4 the image of Diana at Ephesus, which, according to Acts (19 : 35), was the image which fell down from Jupiter, the stones of Amon and Seth at Thebes,5 were meteorites. Also the image of Venus on Cyprus was a stone which fell from the sky.6 The robin-bobin
Palladium of Troy was a stone that fell on the earth "from Pallas Athene" 7 (the planet Venus).
The sacred stone of Tyre, too, was a meteorite related to Astarte, the planet Venus. "Traveling about the world, she [Astarte] found a star falling from air, or sky, which she taking up, consecrated on the holy island [Tyre]."8 At Aphaca in Syria a meteorite fell which "was thought to be Astarte herself," and a temple to Astarte was built there; festivals "were regu-1 Aristotle Meteorologica i. 7. $
2 Frazer, Aftermath (supplement to The Golden Bough) (1936), p. 312.
Two Greek cities, Bura and Helice, were destroyed by earthquake and tidal wave and swallowed by the earth and sea in the year —373, when a comet shone in the sky.
3 According to Mohammed, stones that fell on the sinful tribes were inscribed with the names of those whom they were destined to kill.
* G. A. Wainwright, "The Coming of Iron," Antiquity, X (1936), 6.
8 Wainwright Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, XIX (1933), 49-52.
« Olivier, Meteors, p. 3. 1 Cf. Bancroft, The Native Races, III, 302.
8 R. Cumberland, Sanchoniatho's Phoenician History (1720), p. 36. Lucian says that Astarte was the fallen star of Sanchoniathon. Ibid., p. 321. See also F. Movers, Die Phonizier, I, 639.
290 WORLDS IN COLLISION
larly timed to coincide with the appearance of Venus as the Morning or Evening Star." 9
The stone on which the Temple of Solomon was built—Eben Shetiya, or fire stone—is a bolide that fell in the beginning of the tenth century, in the time of David, when a comet, which bore the appearance of a man with a sword, was seen in the sky.10 The sacred shield of Numa at Rome, the ancile of Roman Mars, was a bolide; it fell from the sky n in the beginning of the seventh century and its origin was connected with Mars.
In the years when the planet Mars had long been pacified, its position was still watched when meteorites fell. Thus the Chinese wrote in —211: "The planet Mars being in the neighborhood of Antares, a star fell at Toung-Kiun, and arriving to the ground, it changed to a stone."12 The people of the place cut a prophecy of evil for the emperor on the stone, and the emperor had it destroyed. Carving messages to peoples or kings on fallen stones was known before and has been practiced since.
One of the stones that fell from the sky is still worshiped today—it is the black stone of Kaaba in Mecca. Now its surface is black from being touched and kissed innumerable times, but under its cover of dirt it retains its original reddish color. It is the holiest thing in Mecca, built into the wall of Kaaba, and pilgrims travel thousands of miles to kiss it.
Kaaba is older than Mohammedanism. Mohammed, in the early part of his career, worshiped Venus (al-Uzza) and other planetary gods, which even today enjoy great veneration among the Moslems as the "daughters of the god." 13
The black stone of Kaaba, according to Moslem tradition, fell from
• Frazer, The Golden Bough, V, 258 ff. Cf. the Section "Worship of the Morning Star," note 18.
W» I Chronicles 21; II Samuel 24. See Tractate Yoma 5, 2; cf. Tractate Sota 48b; also Ginzberg, Legends, V, 15.
11 Olivier, Meteors, p. 3.
12 Abel-Remusat. Catalogue des bolides et des a4roliihes observes a la Chine, p. 7.
13 Wellhausen, Reste arabischen Heidentums, p. 34.
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the planet Venus;14 but another legend says that it was brought down by the Archangel Gabriel.15 Granted that this legend may conceal some information about the origin of the stone, we ought to ask ourselves: Who is the Archangel Gabriel?
The Archangels
In the Scriptures the destruction of the army of Sennacherib is said to have been caused by a
"blast," and a few verses later it is said to have been the act of an angel of God.1 The Talmudic robin-bobin
and Midrashic sources, which relate that the army of Sennacherib was destroyed by a blast and scourge accompanied by a terrible din on the night following the day when the shadow of the sun returned ten degrees, are more specific: the scourge was inflicted by the Archangel Gabriel "in the guise of a column of fire."2 In the present research it has been established that it was the work of Mars.
Are archangels planets? "An old tradition, dating back to Gaonic times, had it that there are seven archangels, each of whom is associated with a planet." 3 "The seven archangels were believed to play an important part in the universal order through their association with the planets and the constellations. There is some variation, in the different versions, in the angels assigned to the planets." * In some medieval writings Gabriel is associated with the moon, but in one or two with Mars.5 The following, however, makes the identification of Gabriel possible: Gabriel is connected with the foundation of Rome. The Jewish legend says that when Solomon took the daughter of Pharaoh to wife, "the Archangel Gabriel descended from heaven and inserted a reed in the sea. About this reed more and more earth was gradually deposited, and, on the day on which Jeroboam erected the golden calves, a little hut was built on the island. This was the first
14 F. Lenormant, Lettres assyriologiques (1871-1872), II, 140. ™ Ibid.
1II Kings 19 : 7 and 35; Isaiah 37 : 7; 37 : 36.
2 Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 95b; Tosefta Targum Isaiah 10 : 32; Aggadat Shir 5, 39 and 8, 45; Jerome on Isaiah 30 : 2.
3 J. Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition (1939), p. 98. * Ibid., p. 250. 5 ibid., p.
251.
292 WORLDS IN COLLISION
dwelling-place of Rome." e Here Gabriel is cast in the role the Romans ascribed to Mars, that of the founder of Rome.7 Our assumption that it was the planet Mars which caused the destruction of the army of Sennacherib in the spring of —687 is implied also by rabbinical sources: Since the Archangel Gabriel is another name for the planet Mars, the ancient Jews knew the origin of the "blast" and the identity of "the angel of the Lord" who destroyed the Assyrian army.
Gabriel is the angel appointed over fire; he is also, according to Origen,8 the angel of war. Thus we again recognize in him Mars-Nergal. The rabbinical tradition says that the Assyrians of the host of Sennacherib, before they died, were permitted by Gabriel to hear "the song of the celestials," which can be interpreted as the sound caused by a close approach of the planet. The words of Isaiah (33 : 3), "at the noise of the tumult [hamon] the people fled," should, according to the Jewish tradition as related by Jerome, refer to Gabriel, Hamon being another of his names.9
The planet Mars is red, and Maadim (the red or the one who reddens) is the name for Mars in the Hebrew astronomical texts. One text says: "The Holy One created Mars—Maadim—that he should throw them [the nations] down into hell."10
A few rabbinical sources attribute the destruction of Sennacherib's army to the action of the Archangel Michael; some ascribe it to both archangels.11 Who, then, is the Archangel Michael?
The entire story of Exodus is connected with the Archangel Michael. In Exodus 14 : 19 the pillar of fire and of cloud is called
8 Ginzberg, Legends, VI, 128 and 280, based on Tractate Shabbat 56b and other sources; also M.
Griinbaum, Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Sprach- und Sagenkunde (1901), pp. 169 ff.
7 Livy, History of Rome, i. Preface; Macrobius Saturnalia xii.
8 Origen De principiis i. 8. "A particular office is assigned to a particular angel ... to Gabriel the conduct of wars." Cf. Tractate Shabbat 24.
9 Jerome on Isaiah 10 : 3; Aggadat Shir 5, 39; Ginzberg, Legends, VI, 363. Cf. V. Vikentiev, "Le Dieu 'Hemen,'" Recueil de Travaux (1930), Faculte des Lettres. Universite Egyptienne, Cairo.
io Pesikta Raba 20, 38b.
"Midrash Shemot Raba (ed. Vilna, 1887) 18:5; Tosefta Targum II Kings
19 : 35.
robin-bobin
WORLDS IN COLLISION 293
Angel of God. According to the Midrash,12 it was the Archangel Michael who made himself "a wall of fire" between the Israelites and the Egyptians. Michael is said to be made of fire. The Haggadah states: "Michael was appointed High Priest of the celestial sanctuary at the same time that Aaron was made high priest of Israel," that is, in the time of the Exodus. Michael was also the angel who appeared to Joshua, son of Nun.
The celestial struggle at the Sea of Passage is depicted in the familiar image of the Archangel Michael slaying the dragon. Michael produces fire by touching the earth, and it was the emanation of this archangel that was seen in the burning bush. He has his abode in heaven and is the forerunner of Shehina or God's presence, but as Lucifer, Michael falls from heaven and his hands are bound by God. All these attributes and acts of the Archangel Michael13 lead us to recognize which planet he represents: it is Venus.
The Archangel Michael, or the planet Venus, and the Archangel Gabriel, or the planet Mars, saved the people of Israel on two dramatic occasions. At the Sea of Passage, when the hosts of Egypt, pursuing the fleeing slaves, could be seen in the distance ("the children of Israel lifted up their eyes, and, behold, the Egyptians marched after them; and they were sore afraid" 14), the sea was torn apart, and the slaves walked on the bottom of the sea and reached the other shore. Their enemies were thrown high by the released tides, which fell down when a spark passed between Venus and the earth.
Eight hundred years passed after the Exodus. The Assyrian hosts, which a generation earlier had removed the Ten Tribes of Israel to an exile from whence they never returned, invaded Judea with the express purpose of crushing rebellious Judah and removing him from his homeland and from the scene of history. A blast from the planet Mars fell upon the camp of the Assyrians and annihilated it. Those rabbinical sources which ascribed this act to both archangels were 12 Pirkei Rabbi Elieser 42.
13 An extensive literature on the Archangel Michael can be found in Ginzberg, Legends, Index Volume, under "Michael."
" Exodus 14 : 10.
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not wrong. Venus pushed Mars toward the earth, and thus both were instrumental in the destruction.
The author of the apocryphal book of the Ascension [Assumption] of Moses knew that "Venus and Mars are each as large as the whole Earth."15
Because of their intervention at moments when the national existence of Israel was at stake, Michael and Gabriel were looked upon as "guardian angels" of the eternal people.
Gabriel is the Hebrew Hercules (Heracles). Actually the classic authors made it clear that Hercules is another name for the planet Mars.18 In the Gospel of Luke (1 : 26) Gabriel is the angel of Annunciation to the Virgin.
In the Roman Catholic Church Michael is the conqueror of Satan, "head of the host of heaven and first of the saints after Mary."
Planet Worship in Judea in the Seventh Century
In the Northern Kingdom the process of disassociating the deity from the celestial object had not yet been completed when the Kingdom was destroyed (—723 or —722), and its population was led away into captivity, from which they did not return. "And they [the tribes of the Northern Kingdom] left all the commandments of the Lord their God, and made them molten images, even two calves, and made a grove, and worshiped all the host of heaven and served Baal" (II Kings 17 : 16).
Only a few years after the deliverance of Judea from the hand of Sennacherib, Manasseh, son of Hezekiah, "built altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts of the house of the Lord" (II Kings 21 : 5). "For he [Manasseh] built again high places which Hezekiah his father had broken down, and he reared up altars for Baalim, and he made groves, and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served them" (II Chronicles 33 : 3).
robin-bobin
is Ginzberg, Legends, II, 307.
10 See note 1, the Section, "The Worship of Mars." Plutarch wrote in Of the Fortune of Romans, Chap. XII: "It is asserted that Hercules was conceived in a long night, the day having been rolled back and retarded against the order of nature and the sun arrested."
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*
It was in the time of Josiah, grandson of Manasseh, and shortly before the exile of Judah to Babylon, that a pure monotheism emerged as an outcome of the progress the Jewish people had made during its long struggle for national existence, on the one hand, and for purification of its concept of God, on the other. "And the king [Josiah] commanded Hilkiah the High Priest ... to bring forth out of the Temple of the Lord all the vessels that were made for Baal and for the grove, and for all the host of heaven: and he burned them without Jerusalem in the fields of Kidron, and carried the ashes of them into Bethel. And he put down the idolatrous priests, whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense in the high places in the cities of Judah, and in the places round about Jerusalem; them also that burned incense unto Baal, to the sun, and to the moon, and to the planets, and to all the host of heaven" (II Kings 23 : 4-5).
The Scriptures do not hide the fact that in Judea, as well as in Israel, the planetary cult was the official cult with the priests and with kings, with many prophets and with the people. Thus Jeremiah, contemporary of King Josiah, says: "At that time, saith the Lord, they shall bring out the bones of the kings of Judah, and the bones of his princes, and the bones of the priests, and the bones of the prophets, and the bones of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, out of their graves: and they shall spread them before the sun, and the moon, and all the host of heaven, whom they have loved, and whom they have served, and after whom they have walked, and whom they have sought, and whom they have worshipped" (Jeremiah 8 : 1-2). And again he says: "And the houses of Jerusalem, and the houses of the kings of Judah, shall be defiled as the place of Tophet, because of all the houses upon whose roofs they have burned incense unto all the host of heaven" (Jeremiah 19 : 13).
In the days of Jeremiah and King Josiah, a scroll was found in a chamber of the Temple (II Kings 22). It is generally thought that it was the book of Deuteronomy, the last book of the Pentateuch. The text of the scroll made a strong impression on the king.
"And lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the
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Lord thy God hath divided unto all nations under the whole heaven" (Deuteronomy 4 : 19).
"Thou shalt not make thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath . . ." (5:8), which is a passage of the Decalogue (Exodus 20 : 4) verbatim.
"If there be found among you . . . man or woman, that hath wrought wickedness . . . and hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them, either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven, which I have not commanded . . . then shalt thou bring forth that man or that woman . . .
and shall stone them with stones, till they die" (17: 2^5).
Thus we see the centuries-long struggle for the Jewish God, Creator and not unanimated planet, itself a creation, being carried on in the closing decades before the exile to Babylon with the help of the book whose authorship was ascribed to Moses.
When the people of Jerusalem were exiled to Babylon, and groups of refugees succeeded in escaping to Egypt, taking with them Jeremiah, they said to him: "But we will certainly . . . burn our incense unto the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto her, as we have done, we, and our fathers, our kings, and our princes, in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem: for then had we plenty of victuals and were well, and saw no evil. But since we left off to burn incense to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto her, we have robin-bobin
wanted all things, and have been consumed by the sword and by the famine" (Jeremiah 44 : 17-18).
It is apparent from this passage that the population of Jerusalem that sought refuge in Egypt thought the national catastrophe fell upon their people, not because they had left the Lord God, but because in the days of Josiah and his sons they had ceased to worship the planetary gods of Manasseh and especially the Queen of Heaven, the planet Venus.
Of this remnant of the people that went to Egypt in the beginning of the sixth century a military colony was established in Ebb (Elephantine) in southern Egypt. Documents (papyri) of this colony were unearthed in the beginning of this century. The Jewish colony
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in Elephantine faithfully worshipped Yahu (Yahwe), the Lord of the sky, as the theophoric names of many members of the colony testify. Scholars were puzzled, however, to find on one of the papyri the name Anat-Yahu; they were uncertain whether it belonged to a goddess or a place or a person. "Anat is the familiar name of the Canaanite goddess identified with Athene in a Cyprian inscription." * The historical facts revealed in the present research make the understanding of such cult easier. The dark tradition that it was the planet Venus that played such an important role in the days when the forebears of these refugees in Egypt left that land and passed through cataclysms of fire and water, sea and desert, was responsible for this syncretism of names.
The Jewish people did not obtain all of its "supremacy" 2 in that one day at the Mountain of Lawgiving; this people did not receive the message of monotheism as a gift. It struggled for it; and step by step, from the smoke rising from the overturned valley of Sodom and Gomorrah, from the furnace of affliction of Egypt, from the deliverance at the Red Sea amid the sky-high tides, from the wandering in the cloud-enshrouded desert burning with naphtha, from the internal struggle, from the search for God and for justice between man and man, from the desperate and heroic struggle for national existence on its narrow strip of land against the overwhelming empires of Assyria and Egypt, it became a nation chosen to bring a message of the brotherhood of man to all the peoples of the world.
1 E. Sachau, Aramaische Papyrus and Ostraka aus einer jiidischen Militarkolonie zu Elephantine (1911), p. xxv.
2 S. A. B. Mercer, The Supremacy of Israel (1945).
CHAPTER 6
A Collective Amnesia
At any rate they seem to have been strangely forgetful of the catastrophe. —Plato, Laws iii (transl. R. Bury)
IT IS an established fact in the learning about the human mind that the most terrifying events of childhood (in some cases even of manhood) are often forgotten, their memory blotted out from consciousness and displaced into the unconscious strata of the mind, where they continue to live and to express themselves in bizarre forms of fear. Occasionally they may be converted into symptoms of compulsion neuroses and even contribute to the splitting of the personality.
One of the most terrifying events in the past of mankind was the conflagration of the world, accompanied by awful apparitions in the sky, quaking of the earth, vomiting of lava by thousands of volcanoes, melting of the ground, boiling of the sea, submersion of continents, a primeval chaos bombarded by flying hot stones, the roaring of the cleft earth, and the loud hissing of tornadoes of cinders.
There occurred more than one world conflagration; the most horrible one was in the days of the Exodus. In hundreds of passages in their Bible, the Hebrews described what happened.
Returning from the Babylonian exile in the sixth and fifth centuries before this era, the Hebrews did not cease to learn and repeat the traditions, but they lost sight of the fearful reality of what they learned. Apparently,
298
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robin-bobin
the post-Exile generations looked upon all these descriptions as the poetical utterances of religious literature.
The talmudists in the beginning of this era disputed whether a deluge of fire, prophesied in old traditions, would take place or not; those who denied that it might come, based their argument on the divine promise found in the Book of Genesis, that the Deluge would not be repeated; those who argued to the contrary, reasoning that though the deluge of water would not recur, there might come a deluge of fire, were attacked for construing too narrowly the promise of the Lord.1
Both sides overlooked the most prominent part of their traditions: the history of the Exodus and all the passages about the cosmic catastrophe, endlessly repeated in Exodus, Numbers, and the Prophets, and in the rest of the Scriptures.
The Egyptians in the sixth pre-Christian century knew about the catastrophes that overwhelmed other countries. Plato narrates the story which Solon heard in Egypt about the world destroyed in deluges and conflagrations: "You remember but one deluge, though many catastrophes had occurred previously." The Egyptian priests who said this and who maintained that their land was spared on these occasions, forgot what happened to Egypt. When, in the Ptolemaic age, the priest Manetho starts his story of the invasion of the Hyksos by acknowledging his ignorance of the cause and nature of the blast of heavenly displeasure that befell his land, it becomes apparent that the knowledge which was possibly alive in Egypt in the days when Solon and Pythagoras visited there, had already sunk into oblivion in the Ptolemaic age. Only some hazy tradition about a conflagration of the world was repeated, without knowing when or how it occurred.
The Egyptian priest, described by Plato as conversing with Solon, supposed that the memory of the catastrophes of fire and flood had been lost because literate men perished in them, together with all the achievements of their culture, and these upheavals "escaped your notice because for many generations the survivors died with no power to express themselves in writing." 2 A similar argument is found in
> Cf. Ginzberg, "Mabul shel esh" in Ha-goren, VIII, 35-51. 2 Plato, Timaeus 23 C.
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Philo the Alexandrian, who wrote in the first century of this era: "By reason of the constant and repeated destructions of water and fire, the later generations did not receive from the former the memory of the order and sequence of events." 3
Although Philo knew about the repeated destructions of the world by water and fire, it did not occur to him that a catastrophe of conflagration was described in the Book of Exodus. Nor did he think that anything of this sort took place in the days of Joshua or even of Isaiah. He thought that the Book of Genesis comprised the story of "how fire and water wrought great destruction of what is on the earth," and that the destruction by fire, about which he knew from the teachings of the Greek philosophers, was identical with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The memory of the cataclysms was erased, not because of lack of written traditions, but because of some characteristic process that later caused entire nations, together with their literate men, to read into these traditions allegories or metaphors where actually cosmic disturbances were clearly described.
It is a psychological phenomenon in the life of individuals as well as whole nations that the most terrifying events of the past may be forgotten or displaced into the subconscious mind. As if obliterated are impressions that should be unforgettable. To uncover their vestiges and their distorted equivalents in the physical life of peoples is a task not unlike that of overcoming amnesia in a single person.
Folklore
Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.
—Psalms 19:2-3
The scholars who dedicate their efforts to gathering and investigating the folklore of peoples are constantly aware that folk tales require interpretation, for, in their opinion, these tales are not inno-robin-bobin
3 Philo, Moses ii.
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cent and unambiguous products of the imagination, but veil some inner and more significant meaning.
The legends of classic peoples, first among them the Greeks, also belong to folklore. As early as pre-Christian times these legends were subjected to interpretation, many interpreters recognizing the symbolic character of mythology.
With Macrobius in the fourth Christian century, there begins a tendency to see in many gods of Egyptian and Greek antiquity the personification of the sun. Macrobius compared Osiris to the sun, and Isis to the moon, disregarding the opinion of earlier authors. He also interpreted Jupiter as the sun.
As the role the planets played in the history of the world retreated ever further into oblivion, the interpretation of nature myths as referring to the sun or the moon became more and more widespread. In the nineteenth century it was the vogue to explain the old myths as inspired by the movement of the sun and the moon, during the day, night, month, and year. Not only Ra, Amon, Marduk, Phaethon, and even Zeus,1 but also king-heroes, like Oedipus, became solar symbols.2
This exclusive role of sun and moon in mythology is a reflection of their significance in nature.
However, in former times the planets played a decidedly more important role in the imagination of peoples, to which fact their religions give testimony. True, sun and moon (Shamash and Sin, Helios, Apollo, and Selene) were also numbered among the planet-gods, but usually they were not the most important ones. Their enumeration among the seven planets sometimes startles the modern scholar, because these two luminaries are so much more conspicuous than the other planets; the dominance of Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, and Mars must startle us even more as long as we do not know what was displayed on the celestial scene a few thousand years ago.
Modern folklorists occupy themselves mainly with the folklore of primitive peoples, material unspoiled by generations of copyists and
1 In the Phaethon story, Ovid makes it clear that Sun and Zeus are two separate deities.
2 In a separate work I intend to trace the historical prototype of the legend of Oedipus Rex.
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interpreters. Being received at its source, it is supposed to shed light not only on the mentality of these primitive peoples, but also on many problems of sociology and psychology in general.
The sociological method explores mythology for evidence of social usages. Folklorists like James Frazer expended their efforts on this aspect. Freud, the psychologist, centered his attention on the motif of father-murder (patricide), presenting it as though it had been a regular institution in ancient times. He makes it appear a general practice in the past and a subconscious urge in present-day man.
However, regular institutions and practices in the life of the family would not give rise to myths.
A writer on this subject has correctly pointed out this fact: "What is quite normal in nature and society rarely excites the myth-making imagination which is more likely to be kindled by the abnormal, some startling catastrophe, some terrible violation of the social code." 3
Even less than daily tribal life do the daily occurrences in nature give rise to legends. The sun rises every morning, it travels from east to west; the moon enters a new phase four times a month; the year has four seasons—such regular changes do not stir the imagination of peoples, because they contain nothing unexpected in themselves. Daily things do not evoke astonishment and influence but little a people's creative faculty. Sunrise and sunset, morning dew and evening mist, are common experiences, and if a single spectacle impresses itself upon us in the course of life, the many sunrises and the many sunsets in our memory pale and each looks like the other.
Seasonal snowstorms or thunderstorms do not leave indelible memories. Only striking, perturbing experiences of a social or physical order are designed to stir the imagination of peoples. Seneca says: "It is for this very reason that the assembly of stars that lends beauty to the robin-bobin
immense firmament does not compel the attention of the masses; but when a change occurs in the order of the universe, all looks are fixed on the sky." *
Even local catastrophes, regarded as very violent, do not serve for
» L. R. Famell, "The value and the methods of mythological study," Proceedings of the British Academy, 1919-1920, p. 47. 4 Naturales quaestiones vii.
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the creation of cosmic myths. First in power to impress the races of the earth are the cataclysms of the past, and on this we have dwelt at length. Comets, because of their causal relation to world catastrophes, and also because of their terrifying appearance, were the kind of phenomenon to kindle the imagination of peoples. But for some reason, the impression they must have made on the peoples of antiquity is not considered in explanation of myths and legends.
Since the invention of the printing press, the great agitation and mass hysteria caused by the more brilliant comets can be traced in contemporary books and pamphlets. Were the ancients immune to these feelings? If not, then why are the exegetes of the Bible and the commentators on the epic compositions of antiquity so remiss as not to think of phenomena that could not but impress the ancients? Or did no comets appear in the sky during ancient times? This, of course, is only a rhetorical question.
Keeping this in mind, we shall be able to answer the question about the striking similarity of certain concepts among peoples of different cultures, sometimes separated by oceans.
Of "Pre-existing Ideas" in the Souls of Peoples
The similarity of motifs in the folklore of various peoples on the five continents and on the islands of the oceans posed a difficult problem for the ethnologists and anthropologists. The migration of ideas may follow the migration of peoples, but how could unusual motifs of folklore reach isolated islands where the aborigines do not have any means of crossing the sea?
And why did not technical civilization travel together with spiritual? Peoples still living in the stone age possess the same, often strange, motifs as the cultured nations. The particular character of some of the contents of folklore makes it impossible to assume that it was only by mere chance that the same motifs were created in all corners of the world. The problem is so perplexing to the scientists that, for lack of a better proposition, an explanation was offered according to which the motifs of folklore are a pre-existing possession in the soul of peoples; peoples are born with these ideas just as an animal is born with an urge to propagate 304 WORLDS IN COLLISION
its kind, to nurse its offspring, to build a lair or a nest, and to travel in herds or migrate in flocks to far-away countries. But it is not so simple to explain in these terms why, for instance, the aborigines of America imagined a witch as a woman riding on a broom across the sky, exactly as the European peoples imagined her. "The Mexican witch, like her European sister, carried a broom on which she rode through the air, and was associated with the screech owl. Indeed, the queen of witches, Tlagoltiotl, is depicted as riding on a broom and as wearing the witch's peaked hat." ' As with the witch on her broom, so also with hundreds of other odd fantasies and beliefs.
The answer to the problem of the similarity of the motifs in the folklore of various peoples is, in my view, as follows: A great many ideas reflect real historical content. There is a legend, found all over the world, that a deluge swept over the earth and covered hills and even mountains. We have a poor opinion of the mental abilities of our ancestors if we think that merely an extraordinary overflow of the Euphrates so impressed the nomads of the desert that they thought the entire world was flooded, and that the legend so born wandered from people to people. At the same time, geological problems of the origin and distribution of till, or diluvial deposit, are awaiting explanation.
The peoples of ancient times, who, like the primitive peoples of the present, lacked modern protection against the elements of nature, and who lived in the insecurity of tropical storms and tornadoes or frost and snowstorms, must have been more accustomed to seasonal disturbances than we are, and would not have been impressed by the overflow of a river to such a degree as to carry their experience to all parts of the world as a story of a cosmic upheaval.
robin-bobin
Traditions about upheavals and catastrophes, found among all peoples, are generally discredited because of the shortsighted belief that no forces could have shaped the world in the past that are not at work also at the present time, a belief that is the very foundation of modern geology and of the theory of evolution. "Present continuity implies the improbability of past catastrophism and violence of change, either in the lifeless or in the living world; moreover, we seek to interpret 1
Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1930), p. 224.
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the changes and laws of past time through those which we observe at the present time. This was Darwin's secret, learned from Lyell." 2 It has been shown in this book, however, that forces which at present do not act on the earth, did so act in historical times, and that these forces are of a purely physical character. Scientific principles do not warrant maintaining that a force which does not act now, could not have acted previously. Or must we be in permanent collision with the planets and comets in order to believe in such catastrophes?
The Pageants of the Sky
Cosmic perturbations took place, catastrophes swept the globe, but did witches fly through the air on brooms? The reader would agree that cosmic catastrophes, if they occurred, could leave, and must have left, similar memories all around the world; but there are fantastic images that do not appear to represent realities. We shall follow this rule: if there exists a fantastic image that is projected against the sky and that repeats itself all around the world, it is most probably an image that was seen on the screen of the sky by many peoples at the same time. On one occasion a comet took the striking form of a woman riding on a broom, and the celestial picture was so clearly defined that the same impression was imposed on all the peoples of the world. It is well known how, in modern times, the forms of comets impress people. One comet was said to look like "un crucifix tout sanglant," another like a sword; actually every comet has its peculiar shape which may also change during the visibility of the comet.
To illustrate what is said here by another example, it may be asked: What induced the Mayas to call by the name of Scorpion the constellation known to us and to the ancients by the same name? 1 The outlines of this constellation do not resemble the shape of this insect. It is "one of the most remarkable coincidences in nomenclature." 2
2H. F. Osborn, The Origin and Evolution of Life (1918), p. 24.
1 Sahagun, in the fourth chapter of the seventh book of his historical work, says that the people of Mexico called the constellation Scorpion (Scorpio) by this very same name.
2 Seler, Ges. Ahhand. zur amer. Sprach- und Alterthumskunde, II (1903), 622. His surmise, disagreeing with the assertion of De Sahagun, was that Scorpion
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The constellation, which is not at all like a scorpion, probably was called by this name because a comet that looked like a scorpion appeared in it. Actually, we read on one of the Babylonian astronomical tablets that "a star flared up and its light radiated bright as day, and as it blazed, it lashed its tail like an angry scorpion." 3 If it was not this particular appearance of a comet that caused the constellation to be called Scorpion, there must have been a similar occurrence on another date.
Another example is the dragon. All around the world this image is prominent in literature and art and also in the religion of peoples. There is probably no nation that does not use this symbol or this creature as an important motif, yet it does not exist. Several scholars thought that possibly it represented some extinct menace that impressed mankind to a much greater degree than any other creature since it appears on the Chinese flag, and in pictures showing Archangel Michael or St. George in battle with it, in Egyptian mythology, in Mexican hieroglyphics and bas-reliefs, and in Assyrian bas-reliefs. However, bones of this presumably extinct reptile have not been found.
From the description of the comet Typhon that spread like an animal over the sky with its many heads and winged body, with fire flaming from its mouths, as described in a previous chapter by quotations from Apollodorus and others, we recognize the origin of this widespread motif.
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The Subjective Interpretation of the Events and Their Authenticity
What helped to discredit the traditions of the peoples about the catastrophes was their subjective and magical interpretation of the events. The sea was torn apart. The people attributed this act to the intervention of their leader; he lifted his staff over the waters and they divided. Of course, there is no person who can do this, and no staff with which it can be done. Likewise in the case of Joshua who com-of the ancients was more to the south. However, with the displacement of the poles, the stars acquired new positions.
8 Kugler, Babylonische Zeitordnung, p. 89.
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manded the sun and the moon to halt in their movements. Because the scientific mind cannot believe that a man can make the sun and the moon to stand still, it disbelieves also the alleged event. What contributes to this is the fact that least of all do we place faith in books that demand belief, religious books, though we swear on these.
The peoples of the past were prepared to see miracles in unusual occurrences; for this reason modern man, who does not believe in miracles, rejects the event together with the interpretation.
But as we find the same event in the traditions of many peoples, and as each people has differently comprehended it, its historicity can be checked, and this in addition to the control offered by natural science. For example, if the geographical poles changed their location, or the axis its inclination, the ancient solar clock would not show the correct time; or, if the magnetic poles became reversed at some time in the past, the lava of earlier volcanic activity must show reversed magnetic orientation.
But there is also a check by folklore. Isaiah foretold to King Hezekiah, probably a few hours before the event, that the shadow of the sundial would return ten degrees. (As we know now, the planet Mars was at that moment very close to the earth, and Isaiah could make an estimate based on experiences during previous perturbations of the earth by Mars.) The Chinese explained this phenomenon as having occurred to help their princes in their strategy, or to settle a quarrel among them. The Greek people thought the phenomenon was an expression of heavenly wrath at the crime of the Argive tyrants. The Latins thought the phenomenon was an omen associated with Romulus, son of Mars. In the Icelandic epos the same event has a different purpose, in the Finnish epos another, and yet others in Japan and Mexico and Polynesia. The American Indians say that the sun went backwards several degrees for fear of a boy who tried to snare it or because of some animal that terrified it. Precisely because there are great differences in the subjective evaluation of the causes or purposes of the phenomenon, we can assume that the folklore of different peoples deals with one and the same factual event, and only the magical explanations of the miracle are subjective inventions. Many accompanying details are preserved in the variants 308 WORLDS IN COLLISION
of different peoples, which could not have been invented without an adequate knowledge of the laws of motion and thermodynamics. It is inconceivable that the ancients or the primitive races would, for instance, by sheer chance invent the tale that a huge conflagration enveloped the American prairies and forests as soon as the sun, frightened off by the snarer, returned a little on its way.
If a phenomenon had been similarly described by many peoples, we might suspect that a tale, originating with one people, had spread around the world, and consequently there is no proof of the authenticity of the event related. But just because one and the same event is embodied in traditions that are very different indeed, its authenticity becomes highly probable, especially if the records of history, ancient charts, sundials, and the physical evidence of natural history testify to the same effect.
In the Section "Venus in the Folklore of the Indians" a few illustrations were offered to illuminate this thesis. In order to illustrate it with additional examples, we choose the nature-folkloristic motif of the sun being arrested in its movement across the firmament in the tales of the Polynesians, Hawaiians, and North American Indians.
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The best known legend cycle on the Pacific islands is that which has for its hero the semigod Maui.1 This cycle comprises a trilogy: "Of the many exploits of Maui three seem to be most widely spread: they are fishing up of the land, snaring the sun and the quest of fire."2 There are two versions of this cycle, one in New Zealand and one in Hawaii, but both are variants of a common tradition.
The Hawaiian version of the snaring of the sun runs thus: "Maui's mother was much troubled by the shortness of the day, occasioned by the rapid movement of the sun; and since it was impossible to dry properly the sheets of tapa used for clothing, the hero resolved to cut off the legs of the sun, so that he could not travel fast.
"Maui now went off eastward to where the sun climbed daily out of
1 "Of all the myths from the Polynesian area, probably none have been more frequently quoted than those which recount the deeds and adventures of the semi-god Maui. The Maui cycle is one of the most important for the study of this whole area." Dixon, Oceanic Mythology, p. 41.
2 Ibid., p. 42.
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the underworld, and as the luminary came up, the hero noosed his legs, one after the other, and tied the ropes strongly to great trees. Fairly caught, the sun could not get away, and Maui gave him a tremendous beating with his magic weapon. To save his life, the sun begged for mercy, and on promising to go more slowly ever after, was released from his bonds."
The "fishing up of islands" or the appearance of new islands took place at the same time; the causal relation to the cosmic change in the sky is evident. In one of the versions told in Polynesia about the fishing up of the islands, it is said that a star was used as bait.
The following is a tale told by the Menomini Indians, an Algonquin tribe.3 "The little boy made a noose and stretched it across the path, and when the Sun came to that point the noose caught him around the neck and began to choke him until he almost lost his breath. It became dark, and the Sun called out to the ma'nidos, 'Help me, my brothers, and cut this string before it kills me.'4
The ma'nidos came, but the thread had so cut into the flesh of the Sun's neck that they could not sever it. When all but one had given up, the Sun called to the Mouse to try to cut the string. The Mouse came up and gnawed at the string, but it was difficult work, because the string was hot and deeply imbedded in the Sun's neck. After working at the string a good while, however, the Mouse succeeded in cutting it, when the Sun breathed again and the darkness disappeared. If the Mouse had not succeeded, the Sun would have died."
The story about snaring the sun associates itself in our mind with one of the occasions when the sun was disrupted in its movement across the sky. The story contains an important detail and enables us to understand a natural phenomenon.
In a previous section we discussed the various versions of the annihilation of Sennacherib's army and the physical phenomena which caused it. According to the Scriptures, in the days of Isaiah the sun was interrupted in its course, turning back ten degrees on the
3 Hoffman, Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, XIV, 181, reproduced by S.
Thompson, Tales of the North American Indians (1929).
4 Ma'nido is "a spirit or spiritual being; any person or subject endowed with spiritual power."
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sundial. That night the army of Sennacherib was destroyed by a blast. In Egypt this victory over the common enemy of the Jews and the Egyptians was observed in a festival at Letopolis, "the city of the thunderbolt"; the holy animal of the city was a mouse, and bronze mice inscribed with the prayers of pilgrims are found in its soil. Herodotus saw there a statue of a god with a mouse in his hand, commemorating the annihilation of the army of Sennacherib. The story he heard gave as the cause of the event an invasion of mice that gnawed the strings of the bows. He also told the story of the changed movements of the sun directly following the record of the destruction of the Assyrian army. We recognized that the image of the mouse must have had some relation to the cosmic drama. The best we could do was to interpret the mouse as a symbol of a simultaneous plague, exemplified by the illness of King Hezekiah.
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The tale of the Indians that combines the snaring of the sun with the deed of the mouse explains the relation of these two elements to each other. Apparently the atmosphere of the celestial body that appeared in the darkness and was illuminated took on the elongated form of a mouse. This explains why the blast that destroyed the army of Sennacherib was commemorated by the emblem of a mouse. The Indian tale grew from the picture on the celestial screen where a great mouse freed the snared sun.
Thus we see how a folk story of the primitives can solve an unsettled problem between Isaiah and Herodotus.
A four-legged animal in the sky approaching the sun was visualized as a mouse by the Egyptians and the Menomini Indians. In the tale of the southern Ute Indians, the cottontail is the animal that is connected with the disruption of the movement of the sun.5 He went to the east with the intention of breaking the sun in pieces. There he waited for the sun to rise. "The sun began to rise, but seeing the cottontail, it went down again. Then it rose slowly again and did not notice the animal. He struck the sun with his club, breaking off a piece, which touched the ground and set fire to the world.
5R. H. Lowie, "Shoshonean Tales," Journal of American Folk-lore, XXXVII (1924), 61 ff.
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"The fire pursued Cottontail, who began to flee. He ran to a log and asked if it would save him if he got inside. 'No, I burn up entirely.' So he ran again and asked a rock with a cleft in it. 'No, I cannot save you, when I am heated I burst. ..." At last he got to a river. The river said, 'No, I cannot save you; I'll boil and you will get boiled.'"
On the plain, Cottontail ran through the weed, but the fire came very close, the weed burned and fell on his neck, "where cottontails are yellow now."
"From everywhere he saw smoke rising. He walked a little way on the hot ground and one of his legs was burned up to the knee; before that he had been long-legged. He walked on two legs, and one of them burned off. He jumped on one till that also burned off."
In this version of the attack on the sun, two points worthy of mention are the world fire following the disruption in the movement of the sun, and the change in the world of animals accompanied by strong mutations. In the section, "Phaethon," we wondered how the Roman poet Ovid could have known of the relation between the interrupted movement of the sun and a world fire unless such a catastrophe had really occurred. The same reasoning applies to the Indians. The story of snaring the sun or attacking the sun is told in many variants, but the world fire is a consistent result. Forests and fields burn, mountains smoke and vomit lava, rivers boil, caves in the mountains collapse, and rocks burst when the sun peeps above the horizon and then disappears and again comes over the horizon.
There is one instance more in the Indian story of the sun being impeded on its path and the ensuing world conflagration. Before the catastrophe, "the sun used to go round close to the ground." The purpose of the attack on the sun was to make "the sun shine a little longer: The days are too short." After the catastrophe "the days became longer."
The ancestors of the Shoshonean Indians, a tribe of Utah, Colorado, and Nevada, appear to have lived in the days of Sennacherib and Hezekiah at such a longitude that the sun was just on the eastern horizon when it changed its direction and went back and then came up again.
CHAPTER 7
Poles Uprooted
WIAT CHANGES in the motion of earth, moon, and Mars resulted from the contacts in the eighth and seventh centuries?
The moon, being smaller than Mars, would have been greatly influenced by Mars if it came close enough to that planet. It could have been drawn nearer to the earth or pulled away to a more remote orbit. It is therefore of interest to investigate whether, in the time shortly after —687, reforms of the lunar calendar were undertaken.
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Also, the earth could have been "removed from her place," which would have meant a change in the orbital circumference and thus in the length of the year, or in the inclination of the terrestrial axis to the plane of the ecliptic and thus in the seasons, in the position of the poles on the terrestrial globe, in the velocity of axial rotation, and in the length of the day, and so on. Some of these changes could be traced if a chart of the sky, drawn in a period prior to —687, could be examined. Such a chart does exist; it is painted on the ceiling of the tomb of Senmut, the Egyptian vizier. As explained previously,1 the tomb dates from a time following the Exodus but before the days of Amos and Isaiah.
The charts of Senmut show the sky over Egypt at two different epochs: one of them depicts the sky of Egypt before the poles were interchanged probably in the catastrophe that terminated the Middle Kingdom; the other represents the sky of Egypt in the lifetime of Senmut. The first chart startled the investigators because in it
1 See the Section "East and West."
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west and east are reversed. Their judgment of the other chart, in which west and east are not reversed, is as follows:
"It is surprising to find that the celestial charts which have been preserved until our time did not correspond to direct observations, nor to the calculations made at the moment of erection of the monument on which these charts are pictured." 2
Modern astronomy does not admit, or even consider, the possibility that at some historical time east and west as well as south and north were reversed. Consequently, the first chart could not have been interpreted at all. The other chart, with its displaced constellations, suggested to the author of the above quotation that it depicted some more ancient tradition. The only change, according to modern astronomy, comes from the precession of the equinoxes or the slow movement of the polar axis which describes a circle in the course of about twenty-six thousand years. The computation of the precession is insufficient by far to explain the position of the constellations on the chart if we rely on the conventional chronology (and even more so if we follow the revised chronology, which brings the age of Senmut and Queen Hatshepsut closer to modern times).
The changes in the geographical position and cosmic direction of the poles caused by the catastrophes of the eighth and seventh centuries, as well as those brought about by the catastrophes of the fifteenth century, can be studied with the help of the astronomical charts of Senmut.
According to Seneca the Great Bear had been the polar constellation. After a cosmic upheaval shifted the sky, a star of the Little Bear became the polar star.
Hindu astronomical tablets composed by the Brahmans in the first half of the first millennium before the present era show a uniform deviation from the expected position of the stars at the time the observations were made (the precession of the equinoxes being taken 2 A. Pogo, "Astronomie Јgyptienne du tombeau de Senmout," Chronique d'Egypte, 1931.
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into consideration).3 Modern scholars wondered at this, in their opinion inexplicable, error. In view of the geometrical methods employed by Hindu astronomy and its detailed method of calculation, a mistake in observation equal to even a fraction of a degree would be difficult to account for.
In Jaiminiya-Upanisad-Brahmana it is written that the center of the sky, or the point around which the firmament revolves, is in the Great Bear.4 This is the same statement we found in Thyestes of Seneca.
In Egypt, too, "the Great Bear played the part of the Pole Star." 5 "The Great Bear never set."6
Could it be that the precession of equinoxes shifted the direction of the axis so that, three or four thousand years ago, the polar star was among the stars of the Great Bear? 7 No. If the earth moved all the time as it moves now, four thousand years ago the star nearest the North Pole must robin-bobin
have been a-Draconis.8 The change was sudden; the Great Bear "came bowing down."9 In the Hindu sources it is said that the earth receded from its wonted place by 100 yojanas,10 a yojana being five to nine miles. Thus the displacement was estimated at from 500 to 900 miles.
The origin of the polar star is told in many traditions all over the world. The Hindus of the Vedas worshiped the polar star, Dhrura, "the fixed" or "immovable." In the Puranas it is narrated how Dhrura became the polar star. The Lapps venerate the polar star and believe that if it should leave its place, the earth would be destroyed in a great conflagration.11 The same belief is found among the North American Indians.12
3 J. Bentley, A Historical View of the Hindu Astronomy (1825), p. 76.
4 Thibaut, "Astronomie. Astrologie und Mathematik," p. 6.
5 G. A. Wainwright, "Orion and the Great Star," Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, XXII (1936).
6 Wainwright, "Letopolis," I own. Egypt. Archaeol., XVIII (1932).
I Wainwright in the Studies presented to F. L. Griffith, pp. 379-380.
8 Cf. H. Jeffreys, "Earth," Encyclopaedia Britannica (14th ed.).
9 Wainwright, Journ. Egypt. Archaeol., XVIII, p. 164.
10 J. Hertel, Die Himmelstore im Veda und im Awesta (1924), p. 28.
II Kunike, "Stemmythologie," Welt und Mensch, IX-X; A. B. Keith, Indian Mythology (1917), p. 165.
M The Pawnee Mythology (collected by G. A. Dorsey; 1906), Pt. I, p. 135.
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The day on which the shortest shadow is cast at noon is the day of the summer solstice; the longest shadow at noon is cast on the day of the winter solstice. This method of determining the seasons by measuring the length of the shadows was applied in ancient China, as well as in other countries.
We possess the Chinese records of the longest and shortest shadows at noontime. These records are attributed to —1100. "But the shortest and the longest shadows recorded do not really represent the true lengths at present." 13 The old Chinese charts record the longest day with a duration which "does not represent the various geographical latitudes of their observatories," and therefore the figures are supposed to have been those of Babylonia, borrowed by ancient Chinese, a rather unusual conjecture.14
The length of the longest day in a year depends on the latitude, or the distance from the pole, and is different at different places. Gnomons or sundials can be built with great precision.15
The Babylonian astronomical tablets of the eighth century provide exact data, according to which the longest day at Babylon was equal to 14 hours 24 minutes, whereas the modern determination is 14 hours 10 minutes and 54 seconds.
"The difference between the two figures is too great to be attributable to refraction, which makes the sun still visible over the horizon after it has set. Thus, the greater length of the day corresponds to latitude 34° 57', and points to a place 2/2° further to the north; we stand therefore before a strange riddle [vor einem merkwiirdigen Ratsel]. One tries to decide: either the tablets of System II do not originate from Babylon [though referring to Babylon], or this city actually was situated far [farther] to the north, about 35° away from the equator."ie 13 J. N. Lockyer, The Dawn of Astronomy (1894), p. 62; cf. M. Cantor, Vor-lesungen iiber Geschichte der Mathematik (2nd ed.. 1894), p. 91. Laplace made efforts to find an explanation for these figures.
14 Kugler, Sternkunde und Sterndienst in Babel, I, 226-227.
15 A gnomon (277 feet high), built by Toscanelli in 1468, during the Renaissance, for the cathedral in Florence, shows midday to within half a second. R. Wolf, Handbuch der Astronomie (1890-1893), n. 164.
16 Kugler, Die babylonische Mondrechnung: Zwei Systeme der Chaldaer iiber den Lauf des Mondes und der Sonne (1900), p. 80.
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robin-bobin
Since the computations of the astronomical tablets did refer to Babylon, there is a possible solution that Babylon was situated at a latitude of 35° from the equator, much farther to the north than the ruins of this city.
Claudius Ptolemy, who, in his Almagest, made computation for contemporaneous and ancient Babylon, arrived at two different estimates of the longest day at that city, and consequently of the latitude at which it was located,17 one of his estimates being practically of the present-day value, the other coinciding with the figure of the ancient Babylonian tables, 14 hours 24 minutes.
The Arabian medieval scholar Arzachel computed from ancient codices that in more ancient times Babylon was situated at a latitude of 35° 0' from the equator, while in later times it was situated more to the south. Johannes Kepler drew attention to this calculation of Arzachel and to the fact that between ancient and modern Babylon there was a difference in latitude.18
Thus Ptolemy, and likewise Arzachel, computed that in historical times Babylon was situated at latitude 35°. Modern scholars arrived at identical results on the basis of ancient Babylonian computations. "This much, therefore, is certain: our tables [System II, and I also], and the astronomers mentioned as well, point to a place about 35° north latitude. Is it possible that they were mistaken by 2° to 2M°? This is scarcely believable." 19
As there was but one Babylon, its location, at some historical time, at 35° north latitude signifies that at the longitude of Babylon the earth since then has turned toward the south, and the direction of the polar axis, or its geographical location, or both, have undergone displacement.
Some of the classic authors knew that the earth had changed its position and had turned toward the south; not all of them, however,
17 Ptolemy, Almagest, Bk. 13 (ed. Halma); Bk. 4, Chap. 10; also idem, Geography, Bk. 8, Chap.
20. Cf. Kugler, Die babijlonische Mondrechnung, p. 81; also Cantor, Vorlesungen iiber Geschichte der Mathematik, pp. 82 ff.
18 J. Kepler, Astronomi opera omnia (ed. C. Frisch), VI (1866), 557: "Et quia altitudinem poli veteri Babyl. assignat 35° 0', novae 30° 31'."
19 Kugler, Die babylonische Mondrechnung, p. 81.
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were aware of the real cause of this perturbation. Diogenes Laertius repeated the teaching of Leucippus: "The earth was bent or inclined towards the south because the northern regions grew rigid and inflexible by the snowy and cold weather which ensued thereon."20 The same idea is found in Plutarch, who quoted the teaching of Democritus: "The northern regions were ill temperate, but the southern were well; whereby the latter becoming fruitful, waxed greater, and, by an overweight, preponderated and inclined the whole that way." 21 Empedocles, quoted by Plutarch, taught that the north was bent from its former position, whereupon the northern regions were elevated and the southern depressed. Anaxagoras taught that the pole received a turn and that the world became inclined toward the south.
As we have seen, Seneca in Thyestes correctly ascribed the displacement of the pole to a cosmic catastrophe.
Temples and Obelisks
In classic authors references can be found to the fact that the temples of the ancient world were built facing the rising sun.1 Orientation toward the sun is, at the same time, orientation toward the visible planets, as all of them travel through the signs of the zodiac or in the ecliptic. The sun changes the point of its rising and setting from one day to another, and the ecliptic makes a corresponding slow swing from one solstice to another. Therefore, for the purposes of accurate observation of whether the terrestrial pole shifted in a sudden way, it was necessary to build the temple observatories, not simply facing the east and the west, but with a device that would permit checking the position of the sun on the days of the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, when the sun rises exactly in the east and sets exactly in the west.
20 This is a translation by Whiston in his New Theory of the Earth. The modern version of L. D.
Hicks differs greatly.
robin-bobin
21 Plutarch, "What Is the Cause of the World's Inclination?" in Vol. HI of Morals (transl. revised by W. Goodwin).
1 Plutarch, Lives, "Life of Numa": "Temples face the east and the sun."
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The Tractate Erubin of the Jerusalem Talmud 2 records "the surprising fact"3 that the Temple of Jerusalem was so built that on the two equinoctial days the first ray of the rising sun shone directly through the eastern gate; the eastern gate was kept closed during the year, but was opened on these two days for this very purpose. The first ray of the equinoctial sun shone through the eastern gate and into the very heart of the Temple.4 There was no sun worship in this arrangement; it was dictated by the events of the past, when the position of the earth, in relation to the rising and setting points of the sun, was moved in world catastrophes. The fall equinox was observed as New Year's day. This ceremony with the equinoctial sun was old. The Babylonian temples, also, had "the gate of the rising sun" and "the gate of the setting sun."5 With the growing belief that there would be no more changes in the world system, a belief expressed also by Deutero-Isaiah (66 : 22), the eastern gate of the Jerusalem Temple was closed forever: it will be opened in Messianic times.
Although unaware of these ancient practices and literary references to the orientation of the temples, a writer of the end of the nineteenth century came to the conclusion that the temples of the ancient world faced the sunrise.6 He found considerable evidence in the position of temples, but he wondered also that there were deliberate changes in the orientation of the foundations of some older temples. "The many changes in direction of the foundations at Eleusis revealed by the French excavations were so very striking and suggestive" that the author asked "whether there was possible astronomical origin for the direction of the temple and the various changes in direction." 7
Further investigation by other authors revealed the fact that gen-
2 Jerusalem Talmud, Tractate Erubin V, 22c.
8 J. Morgenstern, "The Book of the Covenant," Hebrew Union College Annual, V, 1927, p. 45-4 Morgenstern, 'The Gates of Righteousness," Hebrew Union College Annual, VII, 1929.
B Winckler, Keilinschnftliche Bibliothek, III, Part 2 (1890), p. 73.
6 Lockyer, The Dawn of Astronomy. 7 Ibid*, p. viii
WORLDS 72V COLLISION 319
erally only the temples of a later time faced the east, and that earlier temples, built before the seventh century, had their foundations purposely directed—the same orientation can be traced in a number of archaic foundations—away from the present east.8
Knowing by now that the earth repeatedly shifted the direction of the sunrise and sunset, we understand the changes in the orientation of the foundations as the result of changes in nature.
Thus, we have in the foundations of the temples, like that of Eleusis, a record of the changing direction of the terrestrial axis and the position of the pole; the temple was destroyed by catastrophes and rebuilt each time with a different orientation.
Besides the temples and their gates, the obelisks also served the purpose of fixing the direction of east and west, or of sunrise and sunset on equinoctial days. As this purpose was not perceived, the object for which the obelisks were built seemed enigmatic: "The origin and religious significance of the obelisks are somewhat obscure." 9
Two pillars were erected before the Temple of Solomon,10 but their purpose is not revealed in the Scriptures.
In America, obelisk-pillars were built, too. Sometimes a ring was set on the vertex of the pillar for the sun's rays to pass through. "The solstices and equinoxes were carefully observed. Stone pillars were erected eight on the east and eight on the west side of Cuzco, to observe the solstices. ... At the heads of the pillars there were discs for the sun's rays to enter. Marks were robin-bobin
made on the ground, which had been levelled and paved. Lines were drawn to mark the movement of the sun. . . .
"To ascertain the time of the equinoxes there was a stone column in the open space before the temple of the sun, in the center of a large circle. . . . The instrument was called inti-huatana, which means the place where the sun is tied up or encircled. There are
8H. Nissen, Orientation, Studien zur Geschichte der Religion (1906); E. PfeifFer, Gestirne und Wetter im griechischen Volksglauben (1914), p. 7. See also F. G. Penrose, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, CLXXXIV, 1893, 805-834, and CXC, 1897, 43-65. • R. Engelbach, The Problem of the Obelisks (1923), p. 18. «• I Kings 7 : 15.
320 WORLDS IN COLLISION
inti-huatanas on the height of Ollantay-tampu, at Pissac, at Hatun-colla, and in other places." a The Egyptian obelisk could serve as a gnomon, or shadow clock. The length of the shadow and its direction would indicate the hour of the day. Obelisks placed in pairs served as a calendar. On the vernal and autumnal equinoxes their shadows would be continuous for the length of the day, the sun rising exactly in the east and setting exactly in the west.
That the purpose for which the obelisks were erected was to check on the shadow of the sun (and the position of the earth) can be plainly seen from this passage of Pliny:
"The obelisk [of Sesothis, brought from Egypt] that has been erected in the campus Martins [in Rome] has been applied to a singular purpose by the late Emperor Augustus: that of marking the shadow projected by the sun, and so measuring the length of the days and nights." There then follows this remark: "For nearly the last thirty years, however, the observations derived from this dial have been found not to agree: whether it is that the sun itself has changed its course in consequence of some derangement of the heavenly system; or whether that the whole earth has been in some degree displaced from the center, a thing that, I have heard say, has been remarked in other places as well; or whether that some earthquake, confined to this city only, has wrenched the dial from its original position; or whether it is that in consequence of the inundations of the Tiber, the foundations of the mass have subsided." 12
The passage indicates that Pliny envisaged every possible cause, not excluding the one known to have occurred in earlier times when, in the language of Plutarch, "the Pole received a turn or inclination," or in the words of Ovid, "Earth sank a little lower than her wonted place."
The Shadow Clock
The poles changed their locations; all latitudes were displaced; the axis changed its direction; the number of days in the year increased
11 Markham, The Incas of Peru, pp. 115, 116.
12 Pliny, Natural History, xxxvi. 15 (transl. Bostock and Riley).
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from 360 to 365/4, a fact demonstrated in a following section; the length of the day probably also altered. Of course, a sundial or shadow clock from before —687 can no longer serve the purpose for which it was devised, but it might well be of use in proving our assumption.
Such a clock, originating from the period between circa —850 and —720, was found in Faijum in Egypt at latitude 27°. A horizontal slab with hour marks has at one end a shadow-casting vertical hob.1 This shadow clock cannot show correctly the change of time in Faijum or elsewhere in Egypt. A scholar who investigated its working came to the conclusion that it must have been kept with its head to the east in the forenoon and to the west in the afternoon, and several scholars agreed that this was the way to use the clock. But this arrangement by itself did not make it possible to read the time. "Since all actual hour shadows lie substantially closer to the hob than the corresponding marks of the instrument, the shadow-casting edge must have been higher over the shadow-receiving plane than we find it to be. The upper edge cannot be the shadow-caster of the instrument; it must have been on a parallel line above this edge." 2 "The marks were also not made on the basis of actual observations, but must have been taken from some theory or other." 3 But, as a critic remarked, "this theory implies that at no season of the robin-bobin
year did the clock denote the hours correctly, without an hourly alteration of the height of that part of the instrument which cast the shadow." *
As the clock has no device to adjust the height of the head, it is improbable that this hourly manipulation took place. Besides, in order to change the height of the head every hour, in itself an impractical method, it would have been necessary to have another clock to show the hours without any manipulation, thus indicating the exact
1 The Egyptian day was divided into hours that represented equal portions of time between sunrise and sunset, independently of the length of the day.
2 L. Borchardt, "Altagyptische Sonnenuhren," Zeitschrift fur dgyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde, XLVIII (1911), 14.
3 Ibid., p. 15.
4 J. MacNaughton, "The Use of the Shadow Clock of Seti I," Journal of the British Astronomical Association, LIV, No. 7 (Sept. 1944).
322 WORLDS IN COLLISION
moment when the first clock had to be adjusted. But if there was a clock that could show the hours correctly without adjustment, what purpose did the shadow clock serve?
Another explanation has therefore been offered for the manner in which the Egyptian sundial was used. The author of the new idea supposes that at some early date (the precession of the equinoxes being taken into consideration) the shadow clock was used at some latitude in Egypt on the day of the summer solstice. He admits: "Account has, however, not been taken of change in the declination of the sun between sunrise and sunset. . . . For other seasons of the year it would be necessary at each hour or each clock reading, either to alter the height of the hob, or tilt the st't [clock] or both. Indeed, when the sun had south declination, and even when it had slight north declination, it would always be necessary to do both. The inference is, therefore, that the clock was originally used at or near the time of the summer solstice."B The problem of adjustment for each reading once more crops up in this explanation, again requiring some better means of knowing the exact time. The conclusion at which the author of this explanation arrives—that originally the clock was built for a single day in the year—is rather odd and defies the very purpose for which clocks are constructed. And even if a clock were to be read only once a year, the author of this theory could not make the specimen found in Faijum work, but only a similar clock that had been found broken in pieces; and this he could do only by having recourse to the precession of the equinoxes and by referring the clock to a period many hundreds of years earlier than chronolo-gists assume.
The shadow clock found at Faijum, built under the Libyan Dynasty, between about —850 and —
720 before the present era, may help us to learn the length of the day, the inclination of the pole to the ecliptic, and the latitudes of Egypt in that historical period. A change in any of these three factors would have made the clock obsolete as an instrument for time reading, and probably all three factors did change.
We do not possess the sundial of King Ahaz, but we do have the s Ibid.
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shadow clock used in Egypt in the period before the last catastrophe of —687 and possibly before the catastrophe of —747.
The Water Clock
Besides the gnomon or sundial, the Egyptians used the water clock, which had the advantage over the former of showing time during the night as well as during the day.
A complete example was found in the Amon Temple of Karnak (Thebes), 25.5° north of the equator. This water clock dates from the time of Amenhotep III of the Eighteenth Dynasty, father of Ikhnaton. The jar has an opening through which water flows out; marks are incised on the inner surface of the jar to indicate the time. Since the Egyptian day was divided into hours which changed in length with the length of the day, the jar has different sets of markings for the various seasons of the year. Four time points are prominently important: the autumnal equinox, the winter solstice, the vernal equinox, and the summer solstice. The equinoxes have equal days and robin-bobin
nights in all latitudes. But on the solstices, when either the day or the night is the longest of the year, the length of the daylight varies with the latitude: the farther from the equator, the greater is the difference between the day and the night on the day of the solstice. This difference also depends on the inclination of the equator to the plane of the orbit or ecliptic, which is at present 23/2°. Should this inclination change, or in other words, should the polar axis change its astronomical position (direction), or should the polar axis change its geographical position with each pole shifting to another point, the length of the day and night (on any day except the equinoxes) would change, too.
The water clock of Amenhotep III presented its investigator with a very strange time scale.1
Calculating the length of the day of the winter solstice, he found that the clock was constructed for a day of 11 hours 18 minutes, whereas the day of the solstice at 25° north latitude is 10 hours 26 minutes, a difference of fifty-two minutes. Similarly, the builder of the clock reckoned the night of the winter 1 L. Borchardt, Die altagyptische Zeitrechnung (1920), pp. 6-25.
324 WORLDS IN COLLISION
solstice to be 12 hours 42 minutes, whereas it is 13 hours 34 minutes— fifty-two minutes too short.
On the summer solstice, the longest day, the clock anticipated a day of 12 hours 48 minutes, whereas it is 13 hours and 41 minutes, and a night of 11 hours 12 minutes, whereas it is 10 hours 19 minutes.
On the vernal and autumnal equinoxes the day is 11 hours and 56 minutes long, and the clock actually shows 11 hours and 56 minutes; the night is 12 hours 4 minutes long, and the clock shows exactly 12 hours 4 minutes.
The difference between the present values and the values of the day for which the clock is adjusted is very consistent: on the winter solstice the day of the clock is fifty-two minutes longer than the present day of the winter solstice in Karnak, and the night is fifty-two minutes shorter; on the summer solstice the day is fifty-three minutes shorter on the clock and the night fifty-three minutes longer.
The figures on the clock show a smaller difference between the length of daylight on the solstices or between the longest and the shortest days of the year than is observed at Karnak at the present time. Thus the water clock of Amenhotep III, if it was correctly built and correctly interpreted, indicates that either Thebes was closer to the equator or that the inclination of the equator toward the ecliptic was less than the present angle of 23/2°. In either case the climate of the latitudes of Egypt could not have been the same as it is in our age.
As we find from the present research, the clock of Amenhotep III became obsolete in the middle of the eighth century; and the clock that might have replaced it at that time would have been made obsolete in the catastrophes of the end of the eighth and the beginning of the seventh centuries, when once more the axis changed its direction in the sky and its position on the globe as well.
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A Hemisphere Travels Southward
"Behold the world bowing with its massive dome—earth and expanse of sea and heaven's depth!" —Virgil Eclogues iv. 50
The change in the position of the poles carried the polar ice outside the new polar circle, while other regions were brought into the polar circle. There is nothing imperative in the present position of the pole or in the direction of the polar axis. No known astronomical or geological law requires the present direction of the axis and the present position of the pole. I find a similar thought in the writings of Schiaparelli: "The permanence of the geographical poles in the very same regions of the Earth cannot yet be considered as in-contestably established by astronomical or mechanical arguments. Such permanence may be a fact today, but it remains a matter still to be proven for the preceding ages of the history of the globe." "Our problem, so important from the astronomical and mathematical standpoint, touches the foundations of geology and robin-bobin
paleontology; its solution is tied to the [problem of the] most grandiose events in the history of the Earth."x
The present pole was not always the terrestrial pole, nor did the changes occur in a slow process.
The glacial sheet was a polar cover; the ice ages terminated with catastrophic suddenness; regions of mild climate moved instantly into the polar circle; the ice sheet in America and Europe started to melt; great quantities of vapor rising from the surface of the oceans caused increased precipitation and the formation of a new ice cover. Gigantic waves that traveled across continents, more than the movement of the ice, were responsible for the drift, especially in the north, and for the boulders that were carried long distances and placed atop unrelated formations.
If we look at the distribution of the ice sheet in the Northern Hemisphere, we see that a circle, with its center somewhere near the east
1 G. V. Schiaparelli De la rotation de la terre sous I'influence des actions geologiques (St.
Petersburg, 1889), p. 31.
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shore of Greenland or in the strait between Greenland and Baffin Land near the present north magnetic pole, and a radius of about 3,600 kilometers, embraces the region of the ice sheet of the last glacial age. Northeastern Siberia is outside the circle; the valley of the Missouri down to 39°
north latitude is within the circle. The eastern part of Alaska is included, but not its western part.
Northwestern Europe is well within the circle; some distance behind the Ural Mountains, the line curves toward the north and crosses the present polar circle.
Now we reflect: Was not the North Pole at some time in the past 20° or more distant from the point it now occupies—and closer to America? In like manner, the old South Pole would have been roughly the same 20° from the present pole.2
The Brahman charts of the sky show a large difference from what modern astronomers would expect to find. Calcutta being removed 180° longitude from Baffin Land, the Brahman charts would rather correspond to a position of the earth in which the axis would pierce the globe at Baffin Land, close to the present magnetic pole. The change in latitude of other regions to the west and to the east of India would have been smaller.
It is probable that twenty-seven centuries ago, or perhaps thirty-five, the present North Pole was at Baffin Land or close to the Boothia Felix Peninsula of the American mainland.
The sudden extermination of mammoths was caused by a catastrophe and probably resulted from asphyxiation or electrocution. The immediately subsequent movement of the Siberian continent into the polar region is probably responsible for the preservation of the corpses.3
It appears that the mammoths, along with other animals, were killed by a tempest of gases accompanied by a spontaneous lack of oxygen caused by fires raging high in the atmosphere. A few instants
2 In the direction of Queen Mary Land of the Antarctic continent.
3 Greek authors referred to the mummifying quality of ambrosia; they described the process of pouring the fluid ambrosia into the noses of the dead; this was the process used by the Egyptians also in applying their drugs for mummification; the Babylonians used honey for that purpose.
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later their dying or dead bodies were moving into the polar circle. In a few hours northeastern America moved from the frigid zone of the polar circle into a moderate zone; northeastern Siberia moved in the opposite direction from the moderate zone to the polar circle. The present cold climate of northern Siberia started when the glacial age in Europe and America came to a sudden end.
It is assumed here that in historical times neither northeastern Siberia nor western Alaska were in the polar regions, but that as a result of the catastrophes of the eighth and seventh centuries this area moved into that region. This assumption implies that these lands, to the extent that they were not covered by the sea, were most probably places of human habitation. Archaeological work should be undertaken in northeastern Siberia with the purpose of establishing whether these now uninhabited tundras were sites of culture twenty-seven centuries ago.
robin-bobin
In 1939 and 1940 "one of the most startling and important finds of the century" (E. Stefansson) was made at Point Hope in Alaska, on the shores of Bering Strait: an ancient city of about eight hundred houses, whose population had been larger than that of the modern city of Fairbanks, was discovered there, north of 68°, about 130 miles within the Arctic Circle.4
"Ipiutak, as the location of this ancient city is called by the present Eskimos, must have been built before the Christian era; two thousand years is thought a conservative estimate of its age.
The excavations have yielded beautiful ivory carvings unlike any known Eskimo or other American Indian culture of the northern regions. Fashioned of logs, the strange tombs gave up skeletons which stared up at the excavators with artificial eyeballs carved of ivory and inlaid with jet. . . . Numerous delicately made and engraved implements, also found in the graves, resembled some of those produced in North China two or three thousand years ago; others resemble carvings of the Ainu peoples in northern Japan and the natives of the Amur River in Siberia. The material culture of these people was not a
4 By F. G. Rainey and his colleagues under die sponsorship of die American Museum of Natural History in New York; the results of their expedition were published in die anthropological papers of the museum.
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simple one, of the kind usually found in the Arctic, but elaborate and that of a sophisticated people, in this sense more advanced than any known Eskimos, and clearly derived from eastern Asia." s
In Central Alaska, where the ground has been frozen for many centuries, animals with flesh still attached to their bones have been excavated. "Bones of extinct as well as living species of mammals have been found in most of the regions. . . . They remain not as fossilized bones but in a frozen state, and in some cases, ligaments, skin, and flesh adhere to the bones."6 During the season of 1938, "almost the entire skin of a super-bison, the hair remaining," was found in the Fairbanks area.
"Some of the artifacts found after the stripping at depths of 18 to 20 meters below the original surface may have been on or near the surface originally, but the position of others tends to associate them with extinct animal bones at great depths. The recognizable artifacts are implements of chipped stone, bone and ivory."7
In 1936-1937, in a small area designated as Ester, several implements were found, as well as numerous burned stones, in association with mammoth, mastodon, bison, and horse bones, at the bottom of the muck deposits in Ester Creek, some twenty meters below the original surface.8 In 1938 similar finds were made at Engineer Creek at the bottom of the muck, forty meters below the original surface of the soil.9
These vestiges of life and culture far beneath the surface of the ground are, for the most part, remnants buried in catastrophes prior to that described in the present chapter; among them are also remains of culture and life engulfed in the cataclysms of the eighth and seventh centuries.
When the earth's rotation was disturbed, waves of translation moved eastward, because of inertia, and poleward, because of the recession of the waters from the equatorial bulge where they are held by the rotation of the earth. Thus Alaska must have been swept by waters from the Pacific.
6 Description by Evelyn Stefansson in her book, Here Is Alaska (1943), pp. 138 ff. 6 F. G.
Rainey, "Archaeology in Central Alaska," Anthropological Papers of the Museum of Natural History, XXXV, Pt. IV (1939), 391 fi. T Ibid., p. 393. 8 By P. Maas. »By J. L.
Giddings.
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Towns similar to those unearthed in Alaska, and possibly larger ones, will most likely be found in Kamchatka, or farther to the north on the Koluma or Lena rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean. The conditions that preserved mammoths with flesh and skin on their bones must have had the same effect on human beings, and it is not excluded that human bodies encased in ice will be found, too.
robin-bobin
A problem the archaeologists will have to solve is that of clarifying whether the extermination of life in these regions of northwest America and northeast Asia, resulting in the death of mammoths, took place in the eighth and seventh or fifteenth century before the present era (or earlier)—in other words, whether the herds of mammoths were annihilated in the days of Isaiah or in the days of the Exodus.
CHAPTER 8
The Year of 360 Days
PRIOR to the last series of cataclysms, when, as we assume, the globe spun on an axis pointed in a different direction in space, with its poles at a different location, on a different orbit, the year could not have been the same as it has been since.
Numerous evidences are preserved which prove that prior to the year of 365J» days, the year was only 360 days long. Nor was that year of 360 days primordial; it was a transitional form between a year of still fewer days and the present year.
In the period of time between the last of the series of catastrophes of the fifteenth century and the first in the series of catastrophes of the eighth century, the duration of a seasonal revolution appears to have been 360 days.1
In order to substantiate my statement, I invite the reader on a world-wide journey. We start in India.
The texts of the Veda period know a year of only 360 days. "All Veda texts speak uniformly and exclusively of a year of 360 days. Passages in which this length of the year is directly stated are found in all the Brahmanas." 2 "It is striking that the Vedas nowhere mention an intercalary period, and while repeatedly stating that the year
1 W. Whiston, in New Theory of the Earth (1696), expressed his belief that before the Deluge the year was composed of 360 days. He found references in classic authors to a year of 360 days, and as he recognized only one major catastrophe, the Deluge, he related these references to the antediluvian era.
2 Thibaut, "Astronomie, Astrologie und Mathematik," Grundriss der indo-arischen Philologie und Alterthumskunde (1899), III, 7.
330
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consists of 360 days, nowhere refer to the five or six days that actually are a part of the solar year." 3
This Hindu year of 360 days is divided into twelve months of thirty days each.4 The texts describe the moon as crescent for fifteen days and waning for another fifteen days; they also say that the sun moved for six months or 180 days to the north and for the same number of days to the south.
The perplexity of scholars at such data in the Brahmanic literature is expressed in the following sentence: "That these are not conventional inexact data, but definitely wrong notions, is shown by the passage in Nidana-Sutra, which says that the sun remains 13/3 days in each of the 27
Naksatras, and thus the actual solar year is calculated as 360 days long." "Fifteen days are assigned to each half-moon period; that this is too much is nowhere admitted." 5
In their astronomical works, the Brahmans used very ingenious geometric methods, and their failure to discern that the year of 360 days was 5M days too short seemed baffling. In ten years such a mistake accumulates to fifty-two days. The author whom I quoted last was forced to conclude that the Brahmans had a "wholly confused notion of the true length of the year." Only in a later period, he said, were the Hindus able to deal with such obvious facts. To the same effect wrote another German author: "The fact that a long period of time was necessary to arrive at the formulation of the 365-day year is proved by the existence of the old Hindu 360-day Savana-year and of other forms which appear in the Veda literature." 6
Here is a passage from the Aryabhatiya, an old Indian work on mathematics and astronomy: "A year consists of twelve months. A month consists of 30 days. A day consists of 60 nadis. A nadi consists of 60 vinadikas." 7
robin-bobin
A month of thirty days and a year of 360 days formed the basis of early Hindu chronology used in historical computations.
3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. «Ibid.
6 F. K. Ginzel, "Chronologie," Encykhpadie der mathematischen Wissenschaften (1904-1935), Vol. VI.
7 The Aryabhatiya of Aryabhatta, an ancient Indian work on mathematics and astronomy (transl.
W. E. Clark, 1930), Chap. 3, "Kalakriya or the Reckoning of Time," p. 51.
332 WORLDS IN COLLISION
The Brahmans were aware that the length of the year, of the month, and of the day changed with every new world age. The following is a passage from Surya-siddhanta, a classic of Hindu astronomy. After an introduction, it proceeds: "Only by reason of the revolution of the ages, there is here a difference of times." 8 The translator of this ancient manual supplied an annotation to these words: "According to the commentary, the meaning of these last verses is that in successive Great Ages . . . there were slight differences in the motion of the heavenly bodies." Explaining the term bija, which means a correction of time in every new age, the book of Surya says that "time is the destroyer of the worlds."
The sacerdotal year, like the secular year of the calendar, consisted of 360 days composing twelve lunar months of thirty days each. From approximately the seventh pre-Christian century on, the year of the Hindus became 565% days long, but for temple purposes the old year of 360
days was also observed, and this year is called savana.
When the Hindu calendar acquired a year of 365M days and a lunar month of twenty-nine and a half days, the older system was not discarded. "The natural month, containing about twenty-nine and a half days mean solar time, is then divided into thirty lunar days (tithi), and this division, although of so unnatural and arbitrary a character, the lunar days beginning and ending at any moment of the natural day and night, is, to the Hindu, of the most prominent practical importance, since by it are regulated the performances of many religious ceremonies, and upon it depend the chief considerations of propitious and unpropitious times, and the like."9
The double system was the imposition of a new time measure upon the old.
The ancient Persian year was composed of 360 days or twelve months of thirty days each. In the seventh century five Gatha days were added to the calendar.10
8 Surya-siddhanta: A Text Book of Hindu Astronomy (transl. Ebenezer Burgess, 1860).
9 Ibid., comment by Burgess in note to p. 7.
10 "Twelve months ... of thirty days each . . . and the five Gatha-days at WORLDS IN COLLISION 333
In the Bundahis, a sacred book of the Persians, the 180 successive appearances of the sun from the winter solstice to the summer solstice and from the summer solstice to the next winter solstice are described in these words: "There are a hundred and eighty apertures [rogin] in the east, and a hundred and eighty in the west . . . and the sun, every day, comes in through an aperture, and goes out through an aperture. ... It comes back to Varak, in three hundred and sixty days and five Gatha days." ll
Gatha days are "five supplementary days added to the last of the twelve months of thirty days each, to complete the year; for these days no additional apertures are provided. . . . This arrangement seems to indicate that the idea of the apertures is older than the rectification of the calendar which added the five Gatha days to an original year of 360 days."12
The old Babylonian year was composed of 360 days.13 The astronomical tablets from the period antedating the Neo-Babylonian Empire compute the year at so many days, without mention of additional days. That the ancient Babylonian year had only 360 days was known before the cuneiform script was deciphered: Ctesias wrote that the walls of Babylon were 360 furlongs in compass, "as many as there had been days in the year." u
The zodiac of the Babylonians was divided into thirty-six decans, a decan being the space the sun covered in relation to fixed stars during a ten-day period. "However, the 36 decans with their robin-bobin
decades require a year of only 360 days."15 To explain this apparently arbitrary length of the zodiacal path, the following conjecture was made: "At first the astronomers of Babylon recognized a year of 360 days,
the end of the year." "The Book of Denkart," in H. S. Nyberg, Texte zum mazdayasnischen Kalender (Uppsala, 1934), p. 9.
11 Bundahis (transl. West), Chap. V.
12 Note by West on p. 24 of his translation of the Bundahis.
13 A. Jeremias, Das Alter der babylonischen Astronomie (2nd ed., 1909), pp. 58 ff.
liThe Fragments of the Persika of Ktesias (Ctesiae Persica), ed. J. Gilmore (1888), p. 38; Diodorus ii. 7.
15 W. Gundel, Dekane und Dekansternbilder (1936), p. 253.
334 WORLDS IN COLLISION
and the division of a circle into 360 degrees must have indicated the path traversed by the sun each day in its assumed circling of the earth." 16 This left over five degrees of the zodiac unaccounted for. The old Babylonian year consisted of twelve months of thirty days each, the months being computed from the time of the appearance of the new moon. As the period between one new moon and another is about twenty-nine and a half days, students of the Babylonian calendar face the perplexity with which we are already familiar in other countries.
"Months of thirty days began with the light of the new moon. How agreement with astronomical reality was effected, we do not know. The practice of an intercalary period is not yet known." 17
It appears that in the seventh century five days were added to the Babylonian calendar; they were regarded as unpropi-tious, and people had a superstitious awe of them.
The Assyrian year consisted of 360 days; a decade was called a sarus; a sarus consisted of 3,600
days.18
"The Assyrians, like the Babylonians, had a year composed of lunar months, and it seems that the object of astrological reports which relate to the appearance of the moon and sun was to help to determine and foretell the length of the lunar month. If this be so, the year in common use throughout Assyria must have been lunar. The calendar assigns to each month thirty full days; the lunar month is, however, little more than twenty-nine and a half days."19 "It would hardly be possible for the calendar month and the lunar month to correspond so exactly at the end of the year." 20
Assyrian documents refer to months of thirty days only, and count such months from crescent to crescent.21 Again, as in other countries,
16 Cantor, Vorlesungen iiber Geschichte der Mathematik, I, 92.
1-7 "Sin" in Roscher, Lexikon der griech. und rom. Mythologie, Col. 892.
18Georgius Syncellus, ed. Jacob Goar (Paris, 1652), pp. 17, 32.
18 R. C. Thompson, The Reports of the Magicians and Astrologers of Nineveh
and Babylon in the British Museum, II (1900), xix.
20 Ibid., p. xx.
21 Langdon and Fotheringham, The Venus Tablets of Ammizaduga, pp. 45-46; C. H. W. Johns, Assyrian Deeds and Documents, IV (1923), 333; J. Kohler and A. Ungnad, Assyrische Rechtsurkunden (1913) 258, 3; 263, 5; 649, 5.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 335
it is explicitly the lunar month that is computed by the Assyrian astronomers as equal to thirty days. How could the Assyrian astronomers have adjusted the length of the lunar months to the revolutions of the moon, modern scholars ask themselves, and how could the observations reported to the royal palace by the astronomers have been so consistently erroneous?
The month of the Israelites, from the fifteenth to the eighth century before the present era, was equal to thirty days, and twelve months comprised a year; there is no mention of months shorter than thirty days, nor of a year longer than twelve months. That the month was composed of thirty days is evidenced by Deuteronomy 34 : 8 and
robin-bobin
21 : 13, and Numbers 20 : 29, where mourning for the dead is ordered for "a full month," and is carried on for thirty days. The story of the Flood, as given in Genesis, reckons in months of thirty days; it says that one hundred and fifty days passed between the seventeenth day of the second month and the seventeenth day of the seventh month.22 The composition of this text apparently dates from the time between the Exodus and the upheaval of the days of Uzziah.23
The Hebrews observed lunar months. This is attested to by the fact that the new-moon festivals were of great importance in the days of Judges and Kings.24 "The new moon festival anciently stood at least on a level with that of the Sabbath." 25 As these (lunar) months were thirty days long, with no months of twenty-nine days in between, and as the year was composed of twelve such months, with no additional days or intercalated months, the Bible exegetes could find no way of reconciling the three figures: 354 days, or twelve lunar months of twenty-nine and a half days each; 360 days, or a multiplex of twelve times thirty; and 365K days, the present length of the year.
22 Genesis 7 : 11 and 24; 8 : 4.
23The other variant of the story of the Flood (Genesis 7 : 17; 8 : 6) has the Deluge lasting 40
days instead of 150.
2* I Samuel 20 : 5-6; II Kings 4 : 23; Amos 8 : 5; Isaiah 1 : 13; Hosea 2 : 11; Ezekiel 46 : 1, 3.
In the Bible die montii is called hodesh, or "die new (moon)," which testifies to a lunation of diirty days. 25 J. Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel (1885), p. 113.
336 WORLDS IN COLLISION
The Egyptian year was composed of 360 days before it became 365 by the addition of five days.
The calendar of the Ebers Papyrus, a document of the New Kingdom, has a year of twelve months of thirty days each.26
In the ninth year of King Ptolemy Euergetes, or —238, a reform party among the Egyptian priests met at Canopus and drew up a decree; in 1866 it was discovered at Tanis in the Delta, inscribed on a tablet. The purpose of the decree was to harmonize the calendar with the seasons
"according to the present arrangement of the world," as the text states. One day was ordered to be added every four years to the "three hundred and sixty days, and to the five days which were afterwards ordered to be added." 2T
The authors of the decree did not specify the particular date on which the five days were added to the 360 days, but they do say clearly that such a reform was instituted on some date after the period when the year was only 360 days long.
On a previous page I referred to the fact that the calendar of 360 days was introduced in Egypt only after the close of the Middle Kingdom, in the days of the Hyksos. The five epigomena must have been added to the 360 days subsequent to the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty. We have no mention of "five days" in all the numerous inscriptions of the Eighteenth Dynasty; the epigomena or, as the Egyptians called them, "the five days which are above the year," 28 are known from the documents of the seventh and following centuries. The pharaohs of the late dynasties used to write: "The year and the five days." The last day of the year was celebrated, not on the last of the epigomena, but on the thirtieth of Mesori, the twelfth month.29
In the fifth century Herodotus wrote: "The Egyptians, reckoning thirty days to each of the twelve months, add five days in every ye
26 Cf. G. Legge in Recueil de travaux relatifs d la philologie et d VarcMolog egyptiennes et assyriennes (La Mission frangaise du Caire, 1909).
27 S. Sharpe, The Decree of Canopus (1870).
28 E. Meyer, "Agyptische Chronologie," Philos. und hist. Abhandlungen der Preuss. Akademie der Wissenschaften (1904), p. 8.
2» Ibid.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 337
over and above the number, and so the completed circle of seasons is made to agree with the calendar." 30
robin-bobin
The Book of Sothis, erroneously ascribed to the Egyptian priest Manetho,31 and Georgius Syncellus, the Byzantine chronologist,32 maintain that originally the additional five days did not follow the 360 days of the calendar, but were introduced at a later date,33 which is corroborated by the text of the Canopus Decree.
That the introduction of epigomena was not the result of progress in astronomical knowledge, but was caused by an actual change in the planetary movements, is implied in the Canopus Decree, for it refers to "the amendment of the faults of the heaven." In his Isis and Osiris 34
Plutarch describes by means of an allegory the change in the length of the year: "Hermes playing at draughts with the moon, won from her the seventieth part of each of her periods of illumination, and from all the winnings he composed five days, and intercalated them as an addition to the 360 days." Plutarch informs us also that one of these epigomena days was regarded as inauspicious; no business was transacted on that day, and even kings "would not attend to their bodies until nightfall."
The new-moon festivals were very important in the days of the Eighteenth Dynasty. On all the numerous inscriptions of that period, wherever the months are mentioned, they are reckoned as thirty days long. The fact that the new-moon festivals were observed at thirty-day intervals implies that the lunar month was of that duration.
Recapitulating, we find concordant data. The Canopus Decree states that at some period in the past the Egyptian year was only 360 days long, and that the five days were added at some later date; the Ebers Papyrus shows that under the Eighteenth Dynasty the calendar had a year of 360
days divided into twelve months of thirty days each; other documents of this period also testify that the lunar month
so Herodotus, History, Bk. ii. 4 (transl. A. D. Godley).
31 See volume of Manetho in Loeb Classical Library.
32 Georgii Monachi Chronographia (ed. P. Jacobi Goar, 1652), p. 123.
33 In the days of the Hyksos King Aseth. But see the Section "Changes in the Times and the Seasons.'
3* Translated by F. C. Babbit.
338 WORLDS IN COLLISION
had thirty days, and that a new moon was observed twelve times in a period of 360 days. The Sothis book says that this 360-day year was established under the Hyksos, who ruled after the end of the Middle Kingdom, preceding the Eighteenth Dynasty.
In the eighth or seventh century the five epigomena days were added to the year under conditions which caused them to be regarded as unpropitious.
Although the change in the number of days in the year was calculated soon after it occurred, nevertheless, for some time many nations retained a civil year of 360 days divided into twelve months of thirty days each.
Cleobulus, who was counted among the seven sages of ancient Greece, in his famous allegory represents the year as divided into twelve months of thirty days: the father is one, the sons are twelve, and each of them has thirty daughters.35
From the days of Thales, another of the seven sages, who could predict an eclipse, the Hellenes knew that the year consists of 365 days; Thales was regarded by them as the man who discovered the number of days in the year. As he was born in the seventh century, it is not impossible that he was one of the first among the Greeks to learn the new length of the year; it was in the beginning of that century that the year achieved its present length. A contemporary of Thales and also one of the seven sages, Solon was regarded as the first among the Greeks to find that a lunar month is less than thirty days.36 Despite their knowledge of the correct measure of the year and the month, the Greeks, after Solon and Thales, continued to keep to the obsolete calendar, a fact for which we have the testimony of Hippocrates ("Seven years contain 360
weeks"), Xenophon, Aristotle, and Pliny.37 The persistence of reckoning by 360 days is accounted for not only by a certain reverence for the earlier astronomical year, but also by its convenience for every computation.
robin-bobin
35 See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, "Life of Thales."
36 Proclus, The Commentaries on the Timaeus of Plato (1820); Diogenes Laertius, Lives, "Life of Solon"; Plutarch, Lives, "Life of Solon."
37 Aristotle Historia animalium vi. 20; Pliny, Natural History, xxxiv. 12 (transL Bostock and Riley).
WORLDS IN COLLISION 339
The ancient Romans also reckoned 360 days to the year. Plutarch wrote in his "Life of Numa"
that in the time of Romulus, in the eighth century, the Romans had a year of 360 days only.88
Various Latin authors say that the ancient month was composed of thirty days.39
On the other side of the ocean, the Mayan year consisted of 360 days; later five days were added, and the year was then a tun (360-day period) and five days; every fourth year another day was added to the year. "They did reckon them apart, and called them the days of nothing: during the which the people did not anything," wrote J. de Acosta, an early writer on America.40
Friar Diego de Landa, in his Yucatan before and after the Conquest, wrote: "They had their perfect year like ours, of 365 days and six hours, which they divided into months in two ways. In the first the months were of 30 days and were called U which signifies the moon, and they counted from the rising of the new moon until it disappeared."41 The other method of reckoning, by months of twenty days' duration (uinal hunekeh), reflects a much older system, to which I shall return when I examine more archaic systems than that of the 360-day year. De Landa also wrote that the five supplementary days were regarded as "sinister and unlucky." They were called "days without name."42 Although the Mexicans at the time of the conquest called a thirty-day period "a moon," they knew that the synodical moon period is 29.5209 days,43 which is more exact than the Gregorian calendar introduced in Europe ninety years after the discovery of America. Obviously, they adhered to an old tradition dating from the time when the year had twelve months of thirty days each, 360 days in all.44
38 Plutarch. Lives, "The Life of Numa," xviii.
39 Cf. Geminus Elementa astronomiae viii; cf. also Cleomedes De motu circulari corporum celestium xi. 4.
40 J. de Acosta, The Natural and Moral Histories of the Indies, 1880 (Historia natural y moral de las Indias, Seville, 1590).
41 Diego de Landa, Yucatan, p. 59.
<2 D. G. Brinton, The Maya Chronicles (1882).
43 Gates' note to De Landa, Yucatan, p. 59.
44 R. C. E. Long, "Chronology—Maya," Encyclopaedia Britannica (14th ed.): 340 WORLDS IN COLLISION
In ancient South America also the year consisted of 360 days, divided into twelve months.
"The Peruvian year was divided into twelve Quilla, or moons of thirty days. Five days were added at the end, called Allcacanquis." 45 Thereafter, a day was added every four years to keep the calendar correct.
We cross the Pacific Ocean and return to Asia. The calendar of the peoples of China had a year of 360 days divided into twelve months of thirty days each.46
A relic of the system of 360 days is the still persisting division of the sphere into 360 degrees; each degree represented the diurnal advance of the earth on its orbit, or that portion of the zodiac which was passed over from one night to the next. After 360 changes the stellar sky returned to the same position for the observer on the earth.
When the year changed from 360 to 365M days, the Chinese added five and a quarter days to their year, calling this additional period Khe-ying; they also began to divide a sphere into 365K
degrees, adopting the new year-length not only in the calendar, but also in celestial and terrestrial geometry.47
Ancient Chinese time reckoning was based on a coefficient of sixty; so also in India, Mexico, and Chaldea, sixty being the universal coefficient.
The division of the year into 360 days was honored in many ways,48
robin-bobin
"They [the Mayas] never used a year of 365 days in counting the distance of time from one date to another."
45 Markham, The Incas of Peru, p. 117.
48 Joseph Scaliger, Opus de emendatione temporum, p. 225; W. Hales, New
Analysis of Chronology (1809-1812), I, 31; W. H. Medhurst, notes to pp. 405-406 of his translation of The Shoo King (Shanghai, 1846).
47 H. Murray, J. Crawfurd, and others, An Historical and Descriptive Account of China (p. 235); The Chinese Classics, III, Pt. 2, ed. Legge (Shanghai, 1865), note to p. 21.
Cf. also Cantor, Vorlesungen, p. 92: "Zuerst wurde von den Astronomen Babylons das Jahr von 360 Tagen erkannt, und die Kreisteilung in 360 Grade sollte den Weg versinnlichen welchen die Sonne bei ihrem vermeintlichen Um-laufe urn die Erde jeden Tag zuriicklegte."
48 C. F. Dupuis (L'Origine de tous les cultes [1835-1836], the English compendium being The Origin of All Religious Worship [1872], p. 41) gathered material on the number 360, "which is that of the days of the year without the
WORLDS IN COLLISION 341
and, indeed, it became an incentive to progress in astronomy and geometry, so that people did not readily discard this method of reckoning when it became obsolete. They retained their
"moons" of thirty days, though the lunar month in fact became shorter, and they regarded the five days as not belonging to the year.
All over the world we find that there was at some time the same calendar of 360 days, and that at some later date, about the seventh century before the present era, five days were added at the end of the year, as "days over the year," or "days of nothing."
Scholars who investigated the calendars of the Incas of Peru and the Mayas of Yucatan wondered at the calendar of 360 days; so did the scholars who studied the calendars of the Egyptians, Persians, Hindus, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Hebrews, Chinese, Greeks, or Romans. Most of them, while debating the problem in their own field, did not suspect that the same problem turned up in the calendar of every nation of antiquity.
Two matters appeared perplexing: a mistake of five and a quarter days in a year could certainly be traced, not only by astronomers, but even by analphabetic farmers, for in the short span of forty years— a period that a person could readily observe—the seasons would become displaced by more than two hundred days. The second perplexity concerns the length of a month. "It seems to have been a prevailing opinion among the ancients that a lunation or synodical month lasted thirty days."49 In many documents of various peoples, it is said that the month, or the "moon," is equal to thirty days, and that the beginning of such a month coincides with the new moon.
Such declarations by ancient astronomers make it clear that there was no such thing as a conventional calendar with an admitted error;
epigomena." He refers to the 360 gods in the "theology of Orpheus," to the 360 eons of the gnostic genii, to the 360 idols before the palace of Dairi in Japan, to 360 statues "surrounding that of Hobal," worshiped by the ancient Arabs, to the 360 genii who take possession of the soul after death, "according to the doctrine of the Christians of St. John," to the 360 temples built on the mountain of Lowham in China, and to the wall of 360 stadia "with which Semiramis surrounded the city" of Babylon. This material did not convey to its collector the idea that an astronomical year of 360 days had been the reason for the sacredness of the number 360. 49
Medhurst, The Shoo King.
342 WORLDS IN COLLISION
as a matter of fact, the existence of an international calendar in those days is extremely unlikely.
After centuries of open sea lanes and international exchange of ideas, no uniform calendar for the whole world has as yet been devised: the Moslems have a lunar year, based on the movements of the moon, which is systematically adjusted every few years to the solar year by intercalation; many other creeds and peoples have systems of their own containing many vestiges of ancient systems. The reckoning of months as equal to thirty and thirty-one days is also a relic of older systems; the five supplementary days were divided among the old lunar months. But at robin-bobin
present the almanac does not ascribe an interval of thirty days between two lunations or a period of 360 days for twelve lunations.
The reason for the universal identity of time reckoning between the fifteenth and the eighth centuries lay in the actual movement of the earth on its axis and along its orbit, and in the revolution of the moon, during that historical period. The length of a lunar revolution must have been almost exactly 30 days, and the length of the year apparently did not vary from 360 days by more than a few hours.
Then a series of catastrophes occurred that changed the axis and the orbit of the earth and the orbit of the moon, and the ancient year, after going through a period marked by disarranged seasons, settled into a "slow-moving year" (Seneca) of 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 46
seconds, a lunar month being equal to 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, 2.7 seconds, mean synodical period.
Disarranged Months
As a result of repeated perturbations, the earth changed from an orbit of 360 days' duration to one of 365/4 days, the days probably not being exactly equal in both cases. The month changed from thirty to twenty-nine and a half days. These were the values at the beginning and at the end of the century of "the battle of the gods." As a result of the perturbations of this century, there were intermediary values of the year and the month. The length of the year probably ranged between 360 and 365/4 days, but the moon, being a smaller (or
WORLDS IN COLLISION 343
weaker) body than the earth, suffered greater perturbations from the contacting body, and the intermediate values of the month could have been subjected to greater changes.
Plutarch declares that in the time of Romulus the people were "irrational and irregular in their fixing of the months," and reckoned some months at thirty-five days and some at more, "trying to keep to a year of 360 days," and that Numa, Romulus' successor, corrected the irregularities of the calendar and also changed the order of the months. This statement suggests the question: Might it not have been that during the period between consecutive catastrophes the moon receded to an orbit of thirty-five or thirty-six days' duration?
If, in the period of confusion, the moon actually changed for a while to such an orbit, it must have been an ellipse or a circle of a radius larger than before. In the latter case, each of the four moon phases must have been of nine days' duration. It is of interest, therefore, to read that in many sagas dealing with the moon, the number nine is used in measures of time.1
A series of scholars found that nine days was for a while a time period of many ancient peoples: the Hindus, the Persians,2 the Raby-lonians,3 the Egyptians,4 and the Chinese.5 In religious traditions, literature, and astrological works, seven days and nine days compete as the measure of the month's quarter.
In the time of the Homeric epics, the nine-day week became prevalent in the Greek world. The seven-day week and the nine-day
1 "The number nine occurs conspicuously in so many sagas which, for other reasons, I recognized to be moon sagas, that I am convinced that the holiness of this number has its origin in its very ancient application in time division." The author of this passage (E. Siecke, Die Liebesgeschichte des Himmels, Vnter-suchungen zur indogermanischen Sagenkunde [1892]) did not suppose a change in the nature of the lunar cycles, and also was not aware of the work of the scholar referred to in the following footnote, yet he was forced to believe that nine was connected with a time subdivision of a month.
2 A. Kaegi, "Die Neunzahl bei den Ostarien." in the volume dedicated to H. Schweizer-Sidler (1891).
3 Kugler, "Die Symbolik der Neunzahl," Babylonische Zeitordnung, p. 192.
* E. Naville, Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, IV (1875), 1-18. B Roscher, Die enneadischen und hebdomadischen Fristen und Wochen, Vol. XXI, No. 4, of Abhandlungen der philol.-histor. Klasse der Kgl. sachs. Ges. der "Wissenschaften (1903).
344 WORLDS IN COLLISION
robin-bobin
week are both found in Homer.6 The Romans, too, retained the recollection of a time when the week had been of nine days' duration.7
The change from a seven-day phase to a nine-day phase is found in the traditions of the peoples of Rumania, Lithuania, and Sardinia, and among the Celts of Europe, the Mongols of Asia, and the tribes of West Africa.8
In order to explain this strange phenomenon in time reckoning, obviously connected with the moon, the suggestion was made that, in addition to the seventh-day phase of the moon, a nine-day phase was also observed, which is a third part of the month.9 But this idea must be rejected, because a third part of a month of twenty-nine and a half days would more nearly be ten days and not nine.10 Besides, the quarter-month phases are easily observable periods during which the moon increases from new moon to half moon, to full moon, and then decreases accordingly; but a nine-day period falls between these phases.
Therefore, and in view of the vast material from many peoples, we conclude that at one time during the century of perturbations, for a period between two catastrophes, the moon receded to an orbit of thirty-five to thirty-six days' duration. It remained on such an orbit for a few decades until, at the next upheaval, it was carried to an orbit of twenty-nine and a half days' duration, on which it has proceeded since then.
These "perturbed months" occurred in the second half of the eighth century, at the beginning of Roman history.11 What is more, we have
6 Roscher, Die Sieben- und Neunzahl im Kultus und Myihus der Griechen, ibid., Vol. XXIV, No. 1 (1904): "Die beiden Arten von Fristen schon bei Homer und ebenso auch im altesten Kultus nebeneinander vorkommen" (p. 54). "In der Zeit des alteren Epos herrschend gewordene 9-tagige Woche" (p. 73).
7 Cf. Ovid Metamorphoses vii. 23 ff.; xiii. 951; xiv. 57.
8 Roscher, Die Sieben- und Neunzahl. 9 Roscher, Fristen und Wochen.
10 The sidereal month, or the period of time during which the moon completes a revolution in relation to the fixed stars is 27 days, 7 hours, 43 minutes. But the phases of the moon change according to the synodical month of 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes; after a synodical month the moon returns to the same position in relation to die sun as viewed from the earth.
11 It was probably these changes that caused the gods in The Clouds of Aristophanes to accuse the moon of having brought disorder in the calendar and in the cult. Aristophanes, The Clouds 11. 615 ff.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 345
actual dates like "the 33rd day of the month," cited in the Babylonian tablets of that period.12
Thus the month which was equal to thirty days changed to thirty-six and then to twenty-nine and a half days. The last change was simultaneous with the change of the terrestrial orbit to one of 365% days' duration.
Years of Ten Months
When the month was about thirty-six days and the year between 360 and 365/4 days, the year must have been composed of only ten months. This was the case.
According to many classical authors, in the days of Romulus the year consisted of ten months, and in the time of Numa, his successor, two months were added: January and February. Ovid writes: "When the founder of the city [Rome] was setting the calendar in order, he ordained that there should be twice five months in his year. . . . He gave his laws to regulate the year. The month of Mars was the first, and that of Venus the second. . . . But Numa overlooked not Janus and the ancestral shades [February] and so to the ancient months he prefixed two." 1
Geminus, a Greek astronomer of the first century before the present era, says similarly that it was Romulus who (in the eighth century) established the year of ten months.2 Aulus Gellius, a second century author, writes in his Attic Nights: "The year was composed not of twelve months, but of ten."3 Plutarch remarks that in his day there was a belief that the Romans, in the time of Romulus, computed the year "not in twelve months, but in ten, by adding more than thirty days robin-bobin
to some of the months."4 At the beginning of Numa's reign the ten-month year was still the official one.5 "March was considered the first month until the reign of Numa, the full year before 12 Kugler, Babylonische Zeitordnung, p. 191, note, i Ovid Fasti i. 27 ff.
2 Geminus, "Introduction aux phenomenes" in Petau, Uranologion (1630).
3 Aulus Gellius Nodes Atticae iii. 16. 4 Plutarch, The Roman Questions, xix. 5 Eutropius Brcvarium return rornanorum i. 3 says: "Numa Pompilius divided the year into ten months." This must refer to the beginning of Numa's reign, when the calendar of Romulus was still valid.
346 WORLDS IN COLLISION
that time containing ten months," wrote Procopius of Caesarea, who lived in the closing years of the Roman Empire.6 The fact that, in Romulus' time, the first month was named in honor of Mars and the second in honor of Venus shows the importance of these two deities in that period of history. July was named Quintilis (the fifth). The difference of two months still survives in the names September, October, November, and December, which denote the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth months, but according to present-day reckoning they are the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth months, respectively.
Not only was the year divided into fewer than twelve months, but also the zodiac, or the path of the sun and the moon across the firmament, at present consisting of twelve signs, at one time had eleven and at another time ten signs. A zodiac of fewer than twelve signs was employed by the astrologers of Rabylonia, ancient Greece, and other countries.7 A Jewish song in the Aramaic language which is included in the Seder Service refers to eleven constellations of the Zodiac.
The calendars of the primitive peoples disclose their early origin by the fact that many of them are composed of ten months, and some of eleven months. If the time of the lunar revolution was thirty-five days and some hours, the year was something over ten months long.
The Yurak Samoyeds reckon eleven months to the year.8 The natives of Formosa, too, have a year of eleven months.9 The year of the Kamchadals is made up of ten months, "one of which is said to be as long as three." 10 The inhabitants of the Kingsmill Islands in the Pacific, also called the Gilbert Islands, near the equator, use a ten-month period for their year.11 In the Marquesas (in Polynesia
6 Procopius of Caesarea, History of the Wars, Bk. V, "The Gothic War" (transl. H. B. Dewing, 1919), Sec. 31.
7 Boll, Stemglaube und Stemdeutung, p. 92; A. del Mar, The Worship of Augustus Caesar, pp. 6, 11, with references to Ovid, Virgil, Pliny, Servius, and Hyginus.
8 M. P. Nilsson, Primitive Time-Reckoning (1920), p. 89.
9 A. Wirth, "The Aborigines of Formosa," The American Anthropologist, 1897.
10 A. Schiefner, Rulletin de FAcadSmie de St. Petersbourg, Hist.-phil. Cl., XIV (1857), 198,201
f.
11 H. Hale, Ethnography and Philology: U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-42, VI (1846), 106, 170.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 347
south of the equator) ten months form a year (tau or puni), but the actual year of 365 days is also known.12
The Toradja of the Dutch East Indies compute time in moon-months. Each year, however, a period of two or three months is not brought into the computation at all, and is omitted in time reckoning.13
The Chams of Indo-China have a calendar of only ten months to the year.14 The natives in some islands of the Indian Ocean also observe ten months to the year.15
The aborigines of New Zealand do not count two months in the year. "These two months are not in the calendar: they do not reckon them; nor are they in any way accounted for."ie
"Among the Yoruba of South Nigeria the three months—February, March, April—are generally given no specific name."1T
These calendars of primitive peoples are similar to the old Roman calendar. They were not invented in disregard of the solar year ('Tears with less than twelve months are to us the strangest robin-bobin
of phenomena"18); their fault is that they are more constant than the revolution of the earth on her orbit around the sun. The work of adapting the old systems to a new order is still evident in the systems of the aborigines of Kamchatka, South Nigeria, the Dutch East Indies, and New Zealand. Instead of introducing two additional months, as in the reform of Numa, one of the months is extended to triple its length, or a period equivalent to two months is not counted at all in the calendric system.
The abundance of proofs of the existence of a ten-month year is even embarrassing. Since the period when the year was composed of ten months of thirty-five to thirty-six days each was short, how could this ten-month year leave so many vestiges in the calendar systems all over the world? The answer to this question will become simple when we shall find that this was the second time in the history of the
12 G. Mathias, Lettres sur les Isles Marquises (1843), 211.
13 N. Adriani and A. C. Kruijt, De Bare'e-sprekende Toradja's (1912-1914), II, 264.
"Frazer, Ovid's Fasti (1931), p. 386. 1B Ibid.
16 W. Yate (English missionary in the early part of the nineteenth eentury), quoted in Frazer, Ovid's Fasti, p. 386.
1T Ibid. 18 Nilsson, Primitive Time-Reckoning, p. 89.
348 WORLDS IN COLLISION
world that the year was composed of ten months. In a much earlier age, when the year was of an entirely different length, one revolution of the earth was also equal in time to ten revolutions of the moon. We shall trace this period in history in a succeeding volume of this work.
The Reforming of the Calendar
In the middle of the eighth century the calendar then in use became obsolete. From the year —
747 until the last of the catastrophes on the twenty-third of March, —687, the solar and lunar movements changed repeatedly, necessitating adjustments of the calendar. Reforms undertaken during this time soon became obsolete in their turn, and were replaced by new ones; only after the last catastrophe of —687, when the present world order was established, did the calendar become permanent.
Some of the clay tablets of Nineveh found in the royal library of that cityx contain astronomical observations made during the period before the present order in the planetary system was established. One tablet fixes the day of the vernal equinox as the sixth of Nisan: "On the sixth of the month Nisan, the day and night are equal." But another tablet places the equinox on the fifteenth of Nisan. "We cannot explain the difference," wrote a scholar.2 Judging by the accurate methods employed and the precision achieved in their observations, the stargazers of Nineveh would not have erred by nine days.
In the astronomical tablets of Nineveh "three systems of planets" are extensively represented; single planets are followed in all their movements in three different schedules. For the movements of the moon there are two different systems.3 Each of these systems is carried out down to the smallest detail, but only the last system of the planets and of the moon conforms to the present world order.
According to Tablet No. 93, the perihelion, or the point on the earth's orbit that is nearest the sun, is defined as the twentieth degree
1 The palace of Nineveh was the residence of Sargon II, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Assurbanipal.
2 J. Menant, La Bibliotheque du palais de Ninive (1880), p. 100.
3 Kugler, Die babi/lonische Mondrechnung: Zwei Systeme der Chaldaer iiber den Lauf des Mov.dcs und der Sonne, pp. 207-209.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 349
of the sign of the zodiac called the Archer; at aphelion, when the earth is farthest from the sun, the sun is said to be at the twentieth degree of Gemini. Accordingly, these points are designated as stations of the fastest and slowest solar motion. "But the real position of the apsides decidedly robin-bobin
contradicts these statements." 4 Another tablet, No. 272, seventy years younger than the first, gives very different data for the perihelion and aphelion, and scholars wonder at this.
All the numerous data on solar movements in one of the systems lead to one and the same conclusion. "The solstitial and equinoctial points of the ecliptic lay 6° too far to the east." 5
"The distances traveled by the moon on the Chaldean ecliptic from one new moon to the next are, according to Tablet No. 272, on the average 3° 14' too great." 6 This means that during a lunar month the moon moved a greater distance in relation to the fixed stars than present observation shows.
In Tablet No. 32, the movement of the sun along the zodiac is precisely calculated in degrees, and the station of the sun at the beginning of each lunar month is determined exactly; but it is "a perplexing presentation of the ununiform movement of the sun. The question is insistent: Why is it that the Babylonians formulated the nonuniformity of the solar movement precisely in this way?" 7
As the various systems recorded in the astronomical tablets of Nineveh show, the world order changed repeatedly in the course of a single century. Hence, the Chaldean astronomers had the task of repeatedly readjusting the calendar. "From certain passages in the astrological tablets it is easy to see that the calculation of times and seasons was one of the chief duties of the astrologers in Mesopotamia." 8 The scholars ask: How could those men, employed for that very purpose, have made the egregious mistakes recorded in the tablets, and carried these mistakes over into systems in which the movements of the sun, the moon, and the five planets were recorded with repetitions at regular intervals, these movements and intervals being consistently different from those of the present celestial order?
* Ihid., p. 90. B Ibid., p. 72. « Ibid., p. 90. » Ibid., p. 67
8 R. C. Thompson, The Reports of the Magicians and Astrohgers of Nineveh and Babylon, II, xviii.
350
WORLDS IN COLLISION
How could the stargazers who composed the earlier tablets be so careless as to maintain that the year is 360 days long, a mistake that in six years accumulates to a full month of divergence; or how could the astronomers of the royal observatories announce to the king the movements of the moon and its phases on wrong dates, though a child can tell when the moon is new,9 and then record all this in very scholarly tablets requiring advanced mathematical knowledge?10 Hence scholars speak of "enigmatic mistakes." n
However, it appears to us that the tablets with their changing astronomical systems reflect the changing order of the world and consequent attempts to adjust the calendar to the changes.
When the cataclysm of the 23rd of March, —687 brought about another disturbance in the length of the year and the month, the new standards remained uncertain until they could be calculated anew in a series of investigations.
From the time of that catastrophe until about the year —669 or —667, no New Year festivals were observed at Babylon.12 "Eight years under Sennacherib, twelve years under Esarhaddon: for twenty years . . . the New Year's festival was omitted," says an ancient chronicle on a clay tablet.13 According to cuneiform inscriptions, in the days of Sargon II a new world age began, and in the days of his son Sennacherib another world age.14 In the days of Assurbanipal, son of Esarhaddon, son of Sennacherib, the planetary movements, the precession of the equinoxes, and the periodic returns of the eclipses were recalculated, and these new tablets, together with the older ones or copies of the older ones, were stored in the palace library at Nineveh.
9 "The class of magicians who calculated the length of the months and published information concerning them formed a very important section of the Babylonian and Assyrian priesthood."
Ibid., p. xxiii.
10 C. Bezold, "Astronomie, Himmelschau und Astrallehre bei den Babyloniern," in Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, philos.-histor. Klasse, 1911, expresses the opinion that before the sixth century the Babylonians were unaware of the relative robin-bobin
lengths of the solar year and 12 lunar months. See also Gundel, Dekane und Dekansternbilder, p.
379.
11 Kugler, Die Mondrechnung, p. 90.
12 S. Smith, Babylonian Historical Texts, p. 22. 13 Ibid., p. 25.
14 A. Jeremias, Der alte Orient und die agyptische Religion (1907), p. 17; Winckler, Forschungen, III, 300.
WORLDS IN COLLISION
351
The tablets from Nineveh provide the best possible opportunity to learn how the order of the world changed in the eighth and seventh centuries.
Repeated changes in the course of the sun across the firmament led the astronomers of Babylonia to distinguish three paths of the sun: the Anu path, the Enlil path, and the Ea path. These three paths created much difficulty for the writers on Babylonian astronomy, and many explanations were offered and as many rejected.15 The Anu, Enlil, and Ea paths of the planets across the sky appear to denote the successive ecliptics in various world ages. Like the sun, the planets in different times moved along the Anu, Enlil, and Ea paths.
In the Talmudie a number of scattered passages deal with a calendric change made by Hezekiah.
The Talmud was written about a thousand years after Hezekiah, and not all details of the reform are preserved; it states that Hezekiah doubled the month of Nisan.
In later times, in order to adjust the lunar year to the solar year, an intercalary month was added every few years by doubling the last month of the year, Adar. This system of an intercalary Adar is preserved in the Hebrew calendar to this day.
The rabbis wondered why Hezekiah added another Nisan (the first month). The story is told in the Scriptures that Hezekiah, instead of celebrating Passover in the first month, put off the feast to the second month.17 The Talmud explains that it was not the second month, but an additional Nisan.
It must be noted that in Judea in the days of Hezekiah the months were not called by Babylonian names, and therefore the situation should be stated as follows: Hezekiah, after the death of Ahaz, and before the second invasion of Sennacherib, added a month and postponed the feast of Passover. According to the Talmud this was done to make the lunar year correspond more closely to the solar year. As
15 Bezold, Zenit und Aequatorialgestirne am babylonischen Fixsternhimmel (1913), p. 6; M.
Jastrow, The Civilization of Babylonia and Assyria (1915), p. 261.
16 Tractate Berakhot 10b; Pesahim 56a; other sources in Ginzberg, Legends, VI, 369.
IT II Chronicles 30.
352 WORLDS IN COLLISION
we shall see, there appears to be some similarity between this action
and that by Numa at about the same time.
What permanent changes Hezekiah introduced in the calendar is not stated, but it is apparent that at that time calendar reckoning became a complicated matter. As Moses in his day "could not understand how to compute the calendar until God showed him the movements of the moon plainly," so in the days of Hezekiah the determination of the month and of the year became a matter, not of calculation, but of direct observation, and could not be performed much in advance. Isaiah called the astrologers "the monthly prognosticators."1S \ As we have already said, there is in the Talmud19 the information that the Temple of Solomon was built so that on the equinoctial days of the year the direction of the rays of the rising sun could be tested. A gold plate or disc was affixed to the eastern gate; through it the rays of the rising sun fell into the heart of the Temple. The Festival of the Tabernacle (Sukkoth) "was originally an equinoctial festival as Exodus 23 : 16 and 34 : 22 state explicitly, celebrated during the last seven days of the year, and immediately preceding the New Year's Day, the day of the fall equinox, upon the tenth of the seventh month." 20 In other words, New Year's Day, or the day of the autumnal equinox, was observed on the tenth day of the seventh month, the day when the sun rose exactly in the east and robin-bobin
set exactly in the west, the Day of Atonement falling on the same day.21 Thereafter, the day of the New Year was moved back to the first day of the seventh month. Wemay note that not only on the Jewish calendar, but also according to the Babylonian tablets, the equinoctial dates were displaced by nine days: one tablet says that in the spring day and night are equal on the fifteenth of the month Nisan; another tablet says that it takes place on the sixth of the same month. This indicates that the change
18 Isaiah 47 : 13.
19 Talmudic references may be found in the article cited in the following footnote.
20 Morgenstern, "The Gates of Righteousness," Hebrew Union College Annual, VI (1929), p.
31.
21 Morgenstern says: "Upon the tenth of the seventh month ancient Israel celebrated originally, not die Day of Atonement, but die New Year's day." Ibid., p. 37. in the calendar of the feasts observed in Jerusalem followed astronomical changes.
The eastern gate of the Temple of Jerusalem was no longer correctly oriented after the cardinal points had become displaced. On his accession to the throne following the death of Ahaz, Hezekiah "inaugurated a sweeping religious reformation."22 II Chronicles 29 : 3 ff. says: "He in the first year of his reign, in the first month, opened the doors of the house of the Lord, and repaired them." Apparently the natural changes in terrestrial rotation which took place in the days of Uzziah and again on the day of the burial of Ahaz, necessitated a reform. Hezekiah therefore gathered the priests "into the east street" and spoke to them, saying that "our fathers have trespassed" and "have shut up the doors of the porch."
In the pre-Exilic period it was held "to be of imperative necessity that on two days of the year the sun shone directly through the eastern gate," and "through all the eastern gates of the Temple arranged in line, directly into the very heart of the Temple proper." 2S The eastern gate, also called "sun gate," served not only to check on the equinoxes, when the sun rises exactly in the east, but on the solstices as well: a device on the eastern gate was designed to reflect the first rays of the sun on the summer and winter solstices, when the sun rises in the southeast and the northeast, respectively. According to Talmudic authorities, the early prophets experienced much difficulty in making this arrangement work.24
From biblical times vestiges of three calendar systems remain,25 and this assumes a special interest in view of the fact we noted some pages back, namely, that the tablets from Nineveh record three different systems of solar and planetary movements, each of which is complete in itself and differs from the others at every point.
It appears that the adjustment of the calendar, following the initiation of the new world order in the days of Hezekiah, was a long &nd tedious process. As late as one hundred years after Hezekiah,
22 Ibid., p. 33. 23 ibid., pp. 17, 31.
2* The Jerusalem Talmud, Tractate Erubin 22c.
25 Morgenstern, "The Three Calendars of Ancient Israel," Hebrew Union College Annual, I (1924), 13-78.
354 WORLDS IN COLLISION
during the Babylonian exile, in the days of Solon and Thales, Jeremiah, Baruch, and Ezekiel drew up the calendar from year to year.26
When the Jews returned from the Babylonian exile, they brought with them their present calendar, in which the months are called by Assyro-Babylonian names.
"For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I will [do] make, shall remain before me, saith the Lord, so shall your seed and your name remain," reads the closing chapter of the Book of Isaiah. All flesh will come to worship the Lord "from one new moon to another, and from one sabbath to another." The "new heavens" means a sky with constellations or luminaries in new places. The prophet promises that the new sky will be everlasting and that the months will keep forever their established order.
robin-bobin
Daniel, the Jewish sage at the court of Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Exile, when blessing the Lord, said to the king: "He changeth the times and the seasons." 27 This is a remarkable sentence which is also preserved in many Jewish prayers. By the change of seasons or "appointed dates"
(moadim) is meant an alteration in the order of nature, with shifting of solstitial and equinoctial dates and the festivals connected with them. "The change of times" could refer not only to the last change, but to the previous ones also, and it was "the change of the times and the seasons"
that was followed by calendar reforms.
The old Hindu astronomical observations offer a set of calculations different from those of the present day. "What is extraordinary are the durations assigned to the synodical revolutions. ... To meet in Hindu astronomy with a set of numerical quantities widely differing from those generally accepted is indeed so startling that one at first feels strongly inclined to doubt of the soundness of the text. . . . Moreover, each figure is given twice over." 28
In the astronomical work of Varaha Mihira, the recorded synodical revolutions of the planets, which are easy to calculate against the
2« The Jerusalem Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin I, 19a. 27 Daniel 2 : 21.
2* G. Thibaut, p. xlvii of his translation of die Panchasiddhantika, the astronomical work of Varaha Mihira (Benares, 1889).
WORLDS IN COLLISION 355
background of the fixed stars, are about five days too short for Saturn, over five days too short for Jupiter, eleven days too short for Mars, eight or nine days too short for Venus, less than two days too short for Mercury. In a solar system in which the earth revolves around the sun in 360
days, the synodical periods of Jupiter and Saturn would be about five days shorter than they are at present, and that of Mercury less than two days shorter. But Mars and Venus of the synodical table of Varaha Mihira must have had orbits different from their present ones, even if the terrestrial year was only 360 days.
Calendric changes in India were effected in the seventh century: at that time, as in China also, the ten-month year was supplanted by a twelve-month year.29
In the eighth century a calendar reform was made in Egypt. We have already referred to a cataclysm during the reign of the Pharaoh Osorkon II of the Libyan Dynasty; another disturbance of a cosmic nature took place a few decades later, still in the time of the Libyan Dynasty.
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Sosenk III "there occurred a remarkable prodigy of uncertain nature, but in some way connected with the moon." 30 The contemporaneous document written by the royal son, the high priest Osorkon, reads: "In the year 15, fourth month of the third season, 25th day, under the majesty of his august father, the divine ruler of Thebes, before heaven devoured (or: not devoured) the moon, great wrath arose in this land."31 Soon thereafter Osorkon "introduced a new calendar of offerings." 32 The mutilated condition of the inscription makes it impossible to determine the exact nature of the calendric reform.33
It appears that the same or a similar disturbance in the movement of the moon is the subject of an Assyrian inscription, which specks
29 A. del Mar, The Worship of Augustus Caesar, p. 4. so Breasted, Records of Egypt, IV, Sec.
757.
31 Ibid., Sec. 764. See controversy in Zeitschrip fiir agyptische Sprache, VI (1868).
32 Breasted, Records of Egypt, IV, Sec. 756.
»3 A. Erman, Zeitschrip fiir agyptische Sprache, XLV (1908), 1-7.
356 WORLDS IN COLLISION
of the moon being obstructed on its way. "Day and night it was handicapped. In its august station it did not stand." Because of the duration of the phenomenon, it is concluded that "it could not mean an eclipse of the moon."34 The reference to the moon's unwonted position also precludes such an interpretation.
At the end of the eighth or the beginning of the seventh century before the present era, the people of Rome introduced a calendar reform. In the preceding section we referred to Ovid's statement in Fasti concerning the reform of Romulus, who divided the year into ten months, and the reform robin-bobin
of Numa, who "prefixed" two months. Plutarch's "Life of Numa" contains the following passage, part of which has already been quoted: "He [Numa] applied himself, also, to the adjustment of the calendar, not with exactness, and yet not altogether without careful observation. For during the reign of Romulus, they had been irrational and irregular in their fixing of the months, reckoning some at less than twenty days, some at thirty-five, and some at more; they had no idea of the inequality in the annual motions of the sun and moon, but held to the principle only, that the year should consist of three hundred and sixty days." 35
Numa reformed the calendar, and the "correction of the inequality which he made was destined to require other and greater corrections in the future. He also changed the order of the months."
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