[450] The name signifies highland.
[451] The Great Pyramid, p. 159.
[452] It stands out prominent in the first chapter of Genesis. The whole host of heaven was created for earthly purposes.
[453] The reader of the Book of Daniel learns much of the repute of the Chaldeans as astrologers. The Romans were in the habit of calling all astrologers Chaldeans. That people, I may say, never gave the class legal countenance.
[454] In an old Accadian tablet bearing on the observance of the Sabbath by the king, it is said, among other things: “Medicine for his sickness of body he may not apply.” See Smith’s Chaldean Account of Genesis, p. 89.
[455] According to the Bible narrative, which Lenormant says is “a tradition whose origin is lost in the night of the remotest ages and which all the great nations of Western Asia possessed in common, with some variations” (Beginnings of History, p. xv), the luminaries were placed in the heavens “to divide the day from the night and to be signs for the time of festivals, the days and the years” (Gen., i, 14). This is from the Elohist version, which, with the Jehovist, may be found in Lenormant’s work. The ordinary version was drawn from the two.
[456] Architecture, p. 219, 2d ed. By Joseph Swift. London, 1860.
[457] It is well to state that the astrologer was the forerunner of the astronomer. In his interesting book on The Astronomy of the Ancients, Sir J. Cornwall Lewes says: “The word ἀστρολογος signifies an astronomer in the Greek writers. The word astrologus has the same sense in the earlier Latin writers. In later times the distinction which now obtains between the words astrology and astronomy was introduced” (p. 292).
[458] The Greeks generally gave Atlas the credit of introducing it. See Cory’s Ancient Fragments, p. 82. Hodges’ edition.
[459] Tetrabiblos, i, 2.