Ancient calendars and constellations

by Emmeline M. Plunket

To the Manda or Medes, also, I would, as has been suggested, attribute the first imagining of the astronomic emblem common to Ahura and Assur—that of the divine Being presiding over the circle of the ecliptic.

Berosus mentions a Median dynasty as having reigned in Babylon for one or two hundred years. Let us now suppose that the Manda for more than a thousand years held power in Northern Mesopotamia, but that at last the tide of conquest turned, and after many struggles with the Semites in the south the Aryans were finally driven from the land now known as Assyria, and a Semite race firmly settled in the regions from whence in Sargon’s time the Umman Manda had threatened the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Accad. That this was the case about 2,200 B.C. may perhaps be gathered from the monuments of Ḫammurabi, the Semitic king of Babylon, for he refers in his letters to his troops in Assyria, and in a lately discovered inscription of this king he speaks of restoring to the city of Assur its propitious genie, and of honouring Istar in the city of Nineveh.

To account for the existence of the Assyrian nation, their close resemblance in language and race to the ruling Semitic class in Babylon, and yet to explain the great difference in the religion of these two peoples, has always been a difficulty.

The Assyrians worshipped, and worshipped with enthusiasm, all the Babylonian gods; but high above the whole Babylonian Pantheon they placed as their supreme and great Lord Assur—Assur whose very name is not to be met with in Babylonian mythology. This difficulty I would explain in the following manner.

When the Medes had, by Ḫammurabi or his successors, been driven out of Northern Mesopotamia, they were replaced by Semitic settlers who (like the settlers sent into Samaria more than a thousand years later by a king of Assyria) adopted, to a certain extent, the religion of the nation whom they had dispossessed. In 2 Kings xvii. we read that in this parallel instance “the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon, and from Cuthah, and from Ava, and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel: and they possessed Samaria, and dwelt in the cities thereof.” Later in the same chapter we read that in order to appease, as they believed, the wrath of the “God of the land,” these idolatrous settlers, retaining in full the worship of all their own gods, added to it a worship of the Lord of the dispossessed Israelites.

I would suppose then that the polytheistic Semites, who in Ḫammurabi’s time were settled in Northern Mesopotamia, had acted in a similar manner. Coming into a region where for nearly 2,000 years the monotheistic Medes or Manda had been established, they, to avert the wrath of the god of the land, adopted to a certain extent his worship. In fact, like the Samaritans, “they feared the Lord [Asura], and served their own gods.”

This explanation of the difference in religion between the Babylonians and the Assyrians seems to yield also an explanation of the resemblances between the Assyrian and Median religions, or rather of the resemblances between the religious art of the two peoples; and thus we return to the problem proposed for discussion earlier in this Paper, namely, the inadequacy of the generally held opinion which accounts for the resemblances in Persepolitan and Ninevite symbolic art by supposing that the Medes borrowed from the Assyrians.

In support of the alternative suggestion put forward at [p. 75], that the progenitors of the Assyrians at an early period of the worlds history borrowed Tauric and other religious symbolisms from the ancestors of the Medes, I would claim that the Assyrians borrowed not only religious symbolisms, but even the very name of their god Assur from the Medes. For I look upon Assur as a “loan word” adopted from the Aryan Asura.

To the Medes or Manda, who were, as has been argued, in power in Northern Mesopotamia about 4,000 B.C., I have attributed the origin of the astronomic Assyrian and Ahurian emblem. To them, on the same grounds, I attribute the first imagining of the astronomic Assyrian Standard, and the devising of the man-headed and winged monsters so well known as “Assyrian Bulls”; and to them I would, with full conviction, leave the honour of having invented, and not borrowed, the idea of the magnificent Tauric capitals that crowned the columns of Persepolis and Susa.

To all these conclusions I have been led by a consideration of the distinctively equinoctial character of the Median calendar, taken in connexion with the importance given in Median art to the constellation Taurus.