(1.) The month of the “sacrifice of righteousness” to Aries.
(2.) The month of the “propitious Bull” to Taurus.
(3.) The month of “the Twins” to Gemini.
The twelfth and thirteenth names in the same series seem to refer equally clearly to a year originally counted as beginning at the winter solstice. They are called respectively:
“12th. The month of sowing of seed.”—“13th. The dark month of sowing.”
For the sowing of most cereals, late autumn and early winter are the favoured seasons. Many crops however are sown in early spring. There might then be a doubt whether “the month of sowing of seed” more fitly described the spring sowing of seed in the twelfth month of a luni-solar year, counted from the equinox,—or the winter sowing of seed in the twelfth month of a luni-solar year, counted from the solstice. But when we find this twelfth month followed by a thirteenth, of which the especial and added epithet is dark, there can, as it seems to me, be little if any doubt that the winter month whose range in different years extended from 12th of December to 22nd January is better described by the epithet dark, than the rapidly brightening month whose range extended from 12th March to 22nd April.
Very curiously, then, and accurately does the Accadian calendar give us the date of its origin, and of the first naming of its months, as that when the winter solstice coincided with the sun’s entry into the first degree of the constellation Aries[80]—the date in round numbers of 6,000 B.C.
[80] The winter solstice now coincides very closely with the sun’s entry into Sagittarius. It precedes the sun’s entry into Aries by almost a third of the whole circle of the ecliptic.
To this same date it is, as I believe, that the miraculous protections accorded by the Aswins to the distressed solstitial sun and moon and earth appear to point, and fully does this view corroborate the opinion that the Aswin-legends took their rise in pre-Vedic times. They also, as do the Indra and Vritra myths, refer us for their origin to a more northern latitude than tropical India. In the tropics the sun is scarcely less powerful in winter than in summer. The astronomers who drew up the Accadian calendar, and the myth-makers of the Aswin-legends, must, according to the astronomic theory, have dwelt in temperate zones and formulated calendar and myths about 6,000 B.C.