Ancient calendars and constellations

by Emmeline M. Plunket

Position of Colures amongst the Constellations at the dates 4,500-4,000 and 3,500 B.C.

[To face p. 80.

The Phœnicians, the Hittites, the Kings of Gutium, and the “Umman Manda” are then the dreaded foes of Accad. Of the Manda we read as follows: “The Umman Manda comes and governs the land. The mercy seats of the great gods are taken away. Bel goes to Elam.”

Professor Sayce is opposed to the view that the Manda are necessarily identical with the Medes; but he admits that Herodotus, following the authority of Medo-Persian writers, claimed as Median the victories of the Manda.[42]

[42] Proceedings, vol. xviii. Part vi. pp. 176, 177.

If now on the authority of Herodotus and the Medo-Persian writers we assume, at least as a possibility, that these Manda were Medes, we should expect to find them worshippers of Ahura Mazda. Ahura, it is on all hands admitted, is the Iranian form of the Vedic Asura, just as Mithras is the Iranian form of the Vedic Mitra. At whatever date the separation between Iranian and Vedic Aryans took place, the worship of Ahura (still probably under the form Asura) must have existed amongst the Iranians; indeed, many have supposed that the monotheistic reform which placed one great Ahura or Asura above all other Asuras, and above the Devas, occasioned the separation of these two great Aryan races.

It is for the Lord Ahura, called, as here supposed, Asura, in early times, by the Aryan Manda, that I would claim the astronomical symbol of the Archer presiding over the circle of the ecliptic, or, in other words, over the circle of the year, and of a year beginning at the spring equinox—a year, as has already been pointed out, distinctively Median.

According then to this supposition, a powerful Median race was established in the vicinity of Babylonia early in the fourth millennium B.C.—a race who worshipped one great Lord, first under the name of Asura, afterwards under that of Ahura.

It is for these Aryan Manda or Medes that I would claim, at the date of 4,000 B.C., the original conception of the astronomic monogram in which so plainly may be read an allusion to the four constellations of the Zodiac, which at that date marked the four seasons and the four cardinal points, i.e. Sagittarius and Taurus, Aquarius and Leo. This monogram was used as a Standard thousands of years later by the Semitic Assyrians.