The generally received opinion as to Ningirsu (Ninib) is, that he was the god of the “southern sun”; and, as I contended in my Paper, the southern sun, if we think of the sun in its yearly, not merely in its daily course, may fitly represent the sun of the winter solstice, while the goddess Bau = Gula is the goddess by whose very name the constellation Aquarius, as we may assume, was designated in the Accadian astrological texts.
If from Gudea’s inscription concerning the new year’s festival a reform in the calendar of Lagash may be inferred, by which the beginning of the year was transferred from the stars of Aries to those of Aquarius, we should find that the Lagash inscription, and the great History of China, tell us the same story—the Lagash inscription supplementing the Chinese History in this important point—that whereas the account of Tchuen-Hio’s reform has been manifestly more or less garbled in its long descent through human hands: that of Gudea’s new year’s festival is a contemporaneous and utterly untampered-with account. It is also of some moment to note one curious point of resemblance in the idea connected with the stars of Aquarius, by the astronomers of countries so far distant from each other as China and Mesopotamia. Hiu, as we have learnt, may be translated as “Vacuum,” and the name of the goddess Bau or Bahu bears the same signification as the Hebrew word translated in Genesis i. 2 by “void.”[108]
[108] Sayce, Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archæology, February 1874.
If we now accept Tchuen-Hio’s reformation as a re-adjustment of a previously-existing sidereal and originally solstitial calendar, we are at once given the clue to the two so similar Hindu and Chinese traditions quoted above, concerning the initial point of their Lunar Zodiacs: and we shall recognise that Kio—containing the star Spica—in opposition to, and the first degrees of Aswinī, in conjunction with, the sun, obtained the posts of leaders of the lunar series for the same reason—namely, that they marked the beginning of the year at the winter solstice 6000 B.C.
To this same cause I have here, and elsewhere, attributed the fact that in the Accadian calendar the stars of Aries held the same position, and marked the first month of the year, as the month of the “sacrifice of righteousness.”
In thus tracing back the history of the calendars of the ancient nations of the East, in observing the identity of their earliest astronomical traditions, and noting the curious points of contact and divergence in their later scientific and mythological ideas, the impression seems to force itself upon us more and more definitely, that before the races of mankind were “scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth,” their ancestors were capable of great scientific achievements, and possessed in common high intellectual aspirations.
We in these later days, so picturing to ourselves the past, may be freshly struck by the words of the ancient history, which tell us of the time when “the whole earth was of one language and of one speech.”