The dawn of astronomy : a study of the temple-worship and mythology of the ancient Egyptians / by J. Norman Lockyer.

  • Norman Lockyer
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The dawn of astronomy : a study of the temple-worship and mythology of the ancient Egyptians / by J. Norman Lockyer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

    26/476 (page 4)
    stage, the stage of worsliip, is practically missing in the Chinese annals; the very earliest Chinese observations show us the Chinese, a thoroughly practical people, trying to get as much out of the stars as they could for their terrestrial purposes. In Bab}'lonia it is a very remarkable thing that from the beginning of things—so far as we can judge from the records—the sign for God was a star. We find the same idea in Kgypt: in some of the hiero- glyphic texts three stars represented tlie plural gods. I have already remarked that the ideas of the early Indian civilisation, crj^stallised in their sacred books called Vedas, were known to us long before either the Egyptian or the Babylonian and Assyrian records had been deciphered. Enough, however, is now known to show that we may take the Vedas to bring before us the remnants of the first ideas which dawned upon the minds of the earliest dwellers in Western Asia—that is, the territory comprised between the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea, the Indus, and the waters which bound the southern coasts—say, as far as Cape Comorin. Of tliese populations, the Egyptians and Babylonians may be reckoned as the first. According to Lenormant—and he is followed by all the best scholars—this region was invaded in the earliest times by peoj^les coming from the steppes of Northern Asia. Bit by bit they spread to the west and east. There are strange variants in the ideas of the Chalda?ans already recovered from the inscriptions and those preserved in tlie Vedas. Nevertheless, we find a sun-god ^ and the following hymn:— Oh Sun, in the most profound heaven thou shinest. Thou openest the locks which close the high heavens. Thou openest the door of heaven. Oh 1 ]\Iaspero, Histoire ancienne des Peuples de rOrient.'' p. 136. ,