The Median god Ahura Mazda.
FIG. 4.
Western portion of Constellation Sagittarius and the Constellation Corona Australis.
[To face p. 74.
The resemblance, however, between Medo-Persian and Ninevite art is in many instances so striking that some way of accounting for it must be sought, and those who are dissatisfied with one explanation will naturally look about to find some alternative suggestion.
The alternative suggestion I would now propose is that the progenitors of the Assyrians at an early period of the world’s history borrowed Tauric and other religious symbolisms from the ancestors of the Medes.
In support of this theory the following considerations are put forward:
Tauric symbolism, if it is at all astronomic, points us back to a very remote date for its first institution, to a date considerably earlier than that at which the existence of the Assyrian people as an independent nation is generally put. The symbolism already discussed must, at the latest, have been originated about 2,000 B.C. Of the Assyrians as a nation we have no monumental proof earlier than 1,700 B.C.