The word kīmah means, as we have seen, "cluster" or "heap," so also the word Pleiades, which we use to-day, is probably derived from the Greek Pleiones, "many." Several Greek poets—Athenæus, Hesiod, Pindar, and Simonides—wrote the word Peleiades, i. e. "rock pigeons," considered as flying from the Hunter Orion; others made them the seven doves who carried ambrosia to the infant Zeus. D'Arcy Thompson says, "The Pleiad is in many languages associated with bird-names, . . . and I am inclined to take the bird on the bull's back in coins of Eretria, Dicæa, and Thurii for the associated constellation of the Pleiad"[217:1]—the Pleiades being situated on the shoulder of Taurus the Bull.
The Hyades were situated on the head of the Bull, and in the Euphrates region these two little groups of stars were termed together, Mas-tab-ba-gal-gal-la, the Great Twins of the ecliptic, as Castor and Pollux were the Twins of the zodiac. In one tablet ’Îmina bi, "the sevenfold one," and Gut-dûa, "the Bull-in-front," are mentioned side by side, thus agreeing well with their interpretation of "Pleiades and Hyades." The Semitic name for the Pleiades was also Têmennu; and these groups of stars, worshipped as gods by the Babylonians, may possibly have been the Gad and Meni, "that troop," and "that number," referred to by the prophet Isaiah (lxv. 11).
On many Babylonian cylinder seals there are engraved seven small discs, in addition to other astronomical symbols. These seven small stellar discs are almost invariably arranged in the form :::' or :::· much as we should now-a-days plot the cluster of the Pleiades when mapping on a small scale the constellations round the Bull. It is evident that these seven little stellar discs do not mean the "seven planets," for in many cases the astronomical symbols which accompany them include both those of the sun and moon. It is most probable that they signify the Pleiades, or perhaps alternatively the Hyades.
Possibly, reference is made to the worship of the Pleiades when the king of Assyria, in the seventh century b.c., brought men from Babylon and other regions to inhabit the depopulated cities of Samaria, "and the men of Babylon made Succoth-benoth." The Rabbis are said to have rendered this by the "booths of the Maidens," or the "tents of the Daughters,"—the Pleiades being the maidens in question.
Generally they are the Seven Sisters. Hesiod calls them the Seven Virgins, and the Virgin Stars. The names given to the individual stars are those of the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione; thus Milton terms them the Seven Atlantic Sisters.
As we have seen (p. [189]), the device associated expressly with Joseph is the Bull, and Jacob's blessing to his son has been sometimes rendered—
"Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a well; the daughters walk upon the bull."
That is, "the Seven Sisters," the Pleiades, are on the shoulder of Taurus.
Aratus wrote of the number of the Pleiades—
"Seven paths aloft men say they take,
Yet six alone are viewed by mortal eyes.
From Zeus' abode no star unknown is lost,
Since first from birth we heard, but thus the tale is told."