Ancient calendars and constellations

by Emmeline M. Plunket

[Ahura Mazda, a note reprinted from the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology, February 1900]

Professor Hommel in the March number for 1899 of these Proceedings calls attention in his Assyriological Notes to the name “Assara Mazas” appearing in a list of Assyrian gods. The section of the list in which this name appears contains “a number of foreign sounding names” belonging to gods honoured, presumably, in out-lying portions of the Assyrian dominions.

Professor Hommel claims “that this god (Assara Mazas) is no other than the Iranian Ahura Mazda,” and he thus concludes his arguments in favour of this opinion—“concerning Assara-mazas, I should like to remark in closing this paragraph, that we have here the same older pronunciation of Iranian words as in the Kassitic Surias, ‘sun’ (later Ahura and Hvarya, but comp. Sanscrit Asura and suria), which is of the highest importance for the history of the Aryan languages. In the same Kassitic period, between 1,700 and 1,200 B.C., I suppose was borrowed by the Assyrians the Iranian god Assara-mazas.”

In a Paper entitled The Median Calendar and the Constellation Taurus, printed in the June number for 1897 of these Proceedings, I made a very similar claim for the derivation of the name of the great god of the Assyrians—Assur.

The claim put forward was not based only on the resemblance in sound of “Assur” and “Ahura,” but was in the first place founded on the virtual identity of the emblems of Assur and Ahura Mazda. For the origin of these emblems (referring as it was suggested they did to the Zodiacal constellation Sagittarius) a date as high as 4,000 B.C. was, on astronomic grounds, assumed, and it was pointed out that at that date there was no evidence of the existence of the Assyrian nation as a nation, nor any trace of a Semitic worship of the god Assur; whereas, on the other hand, as early as 3,800 B.C. there is evidence that a powerful Aryan race—the Manda—rivalled the power, and threatened the Semitic rule of Sargon of Agane.

The opinion that the symbol of Ahura Mazda, and of Assur, was of ancient Aryan origin, naturally suggested the further thought that the name Assur, so closely resembling the earlier Indo-Iranian form Asura, of the Iranian Ahura, had, together with the emblem of the god, been borrowed from the Aryan ancestors of the Medo-Persians by the Semitic settlers who, early in the second millennium B.C., established themselves to the north of Babylonia. It may here be pointed out that no very certain Semitic derivation at present holds the field which the proposed Aryan derivation would occupy. According to some scholars it comes from a word signifying “a well-watered plain.” According to Professor Hommel, the name Assur is derived from a word which originally meant “the heavenly host.”

Professor Hommel, quoting as his authority the opinions of the Sanscrit scholar Oldenburg, and reinforcing Oldenburg’s opinions by arguments from other sources, further maintains the high probability of the Median god Ahura Mazda having been the representative of the Vedic Varuna, and also that Varuna was the moon.

Vedic scholars are divided in opinion as to what physical phenomenon is represented by Varuna. He is very generally supposed to personify “the vast extent of the encompassing sky,” some say especially the sky at night-time—others claim him as a solar divinity, whilst Oldenburg, as we have seen, supposes him to be the moon. It is not to the question, however, what phenomenon Varuna represented, but to that of the probability or improbability of his original identity with the Median Ahura Mazda, that I would now draw attention.

It is said that “the parallel in character, though not in name, of the god Varuna is Ahura Mazda, the Wise Spirit.” But a variety of considerations may lead us to entertain the possibility of a Vedic god other than Varuna being the parallel in character and in epithet of Ahura Mazda; a parallel which is also still more clearly to be recognized if we adopt the view, above contended for, of the identity of Assur, the archer god of Assyria, with Ahura Mazda.

The Vedic god Rudra is, like Varuna, an Asura or Spirit. He is described as “the wise,” and his votaries are encouraged to worship him “for a comprehensive and sound understanding.” But in one passage the epithet “asura maha,” so curiously recalling to our ears the name of the Avestan “Ahura Mazda,” is actually applied to him.[81] As a wise and great Asura, Rudra seems to be as close a parallel to Ahura Mazda as Varuna; the resemblance of epithet in the case of Rudra makes the parallelism closer.