six periods of 43,200 years, which would accord with the notion set forth by the Jews of the Babylonish captivity and propounded in the Talmudic treatise Rósh-háshanáh, that the creation was commenced at the autumnal equinox. Just as the first king or the first man corresponds to the second month and the second sign of the zodiac, so the third sign is that of the Twins, and to this sign and to the third month (Sivan May-June) corresponded the legend of the fratricide and of the founding of the first city, connected by the Bible with the second human generation. The fifth month of the year is "the month of fire," the fifth sign that of the Lion, which personifies the igneous principle ; and the fourth of the antediluvian kings is called, in Berosus, Ammenôn, and in the native documents 'Hammanu, "the burning, the fiery." These facts being granted, can the following be regarded simply as the result of a fortuitous coincidence? The ninth sign of the zodiac is the Archer; the tutelar deity of the ninth month of the Chaldæo-Babylonian year is Nergal, the warlike and armed god par excellence; the Semitic name of this month (November-December) is Kisiliv, plainly derived from the name of the constellation of Kesil, or "the strong, arrogant man," who is several times spoken of in the Bible. But according to the cyclical system which we are reconstructing, the ninth month and the ninth sign must correspond to the eighth of the antediluvian patriarchs; and in the genealogy of Genesis this patriarch receives the name of Methushela'h," the man armed with the arrow, the archer." Critics have been struck, and could not fail to be, by the exact number of 365 years attributed to the life of 'Hanoch, who at the end of this time is taken to heaven. Starting from the idea that this number is that of the days of the solar year, Ewald has laboured to show in 'Hanoch an ancient god of the renewing of the year. Here considerable caution must be exercised with regard to one part of the opinion of this illustrious interpreter. For the Hebrews the year was exclusively lunar, and of 354 days; for the Chaldæo-Babylonians it contained 360 days, excluding the five days which the Egyptians added by way of epact to the twelve months of thirty days. Consequently the number 365, which would coincide with that of the days of the year in an Egyptian or Hebræo-Egyptian tradition, does not present the same agreement in a tradition which is essentially Hebreo-Chaldean. Besides, in order that 'Hanoch should be placed at the commencement of a new year in the calendarial system of Genesis, which commences the year at the autumnal equinox, it would be necessary that Adam should correspond to the sign of the Ram, and not to that of the Bull; and by this means the Deluge would no longer correspond to the Water-bearer. It is not with the number of the days of the year, then, that the life of 'Hanoch coincides, but with that of the days of the astronomical revolution of the sun, which the Chaldeans reckoned first as 365 days, and afterwards, when their knowledge of the sidereal motions had made progress, at 365 days, and to which they adjusted their civil year of 360 days, the only one ever used by them, by means of a

cycle of intercalation. Besides, it is impossible not to recognise that all the figures relating to the life of 'Hanoch bear traces of a symmetrical arrangement which manifestly discloses a purpose of symbolism; for he is born when his father Yered is 162 years old (9 x 6 x 3); he becomes the father of Methushela'h at 65 years (7 + 6 × 5); and after this he lives 300 years more, until the time when "he is taken to heaven for having pleased God, while angels of heaven fall to earth on account of their transgression."* He is, moreover, the seventh of the patriarchs, reckoning from Adam, and the manner in which the Epistle of St. Jude lays stress upon this peculiarity in referring to a passage of the apocalyptic and apocryphal book to which the name of 'Hanoch had been attached shows that the Jewish tradition did not hesitate to give to this circumstance a symbolical interpretation. In the Chaldean tradition the reign of the seventh antediluvian king, who corresponds to 'Hanoch, is marked by the last of the divine revelations, and among the tutelar deities of the months, the god of the eighth month, to whom is related this seventh of the primordial monarchs, is "Maruduk, the herald of the gods;" lastly, the month itself is called "the month of the opening of the foundation." Now, if the name of 'Hanoch characterizes this patriarch as the "initiator," the "introducer" par excellence, it is, as I have already said, in connection with the spiritual life; he is a type of justice, of pure life and prophetic sanctity. Hence have arisen. all the legends which Judaism has grouped around his name; and hence also the local traditions of Iconion in Lycaonia, in which he was known under the name of Annakos, represented him as a prophet.† 'Hanoch, who, we are told, was deified, like Seth, thus comes, by the essential features of his physiognomy, to have a singular likeness to the Babylonian Maruduk, "the herald of the gods," the revealer par excellence, the usual medium of communication between the master of supreme wisdom, Hea, and the human race; whose planet (Jupiter) watches over the maintenance of justice in the world, and as such receives from the Jews the appellation of Cedeq; who (finally) "walks before Hea "§ as 'Hanoch "walked with God."|| But Maruduk was originally a solar personification, and has always retained something of this character; his name is nothing else than a Semitic corruption of the Accadian Amarutuki, signifying "splendour of the sun;" the solar number of 365 years is therefore specially suited to him, and it seems evident to me that the Hebrews, in attributing this length of life to 'Hanoch, have borrowed it. from a foreign computation in which it was founded on the assimilation of the seventh patriarch to the tutelar deity of Babylon.

Let us now remark, on the one hand, that Maruduk is a god who is reputed to have reigned on the earth, at Babylon, where his tomb was shown; and, on the other hand, that he is the last of the solar personifications placed in the cycle of the gods who preside over the months.. *S. Iren., Adv. Hæres., iv. 16. 2. + Steph. Byz, vo. 'Ikovov; Suid., vo. Navvakós.

* Suid., νο. Σήθ. § "Cuneif. Inscr. of West. Asia," t. iv. pl. 30, 3, reverse, l. 42-45.. The expression "to walk before God" is used in the Pentateuch (Gen. xvii. 1) as a synonym of "to walk with God."

*

And the succession of these solar personifications in the progress of the calendar is essentially significant; it expresses the principal phases of the revolution of the sun, his alternations of power and weakness. First, he is, in the month of Duz, at the time of the summer solstice, "Adar the warrior," that is to say, "the sun of the south," the noonday sun, he who, as Adar-malik, corresponds to the Moloch of Phoenicia and Palestine; the implacable summer sun, who at the hour of noon, when the intensity of his heat reaches its culminating point, devours the products of the earth, and whom human victims alone can appease; he who, in short, at the commencement of the month of Duz, kills Dumuzi (Tammuz-Adonis), the young and gracious sun of the spring. Three months afterwards, in Tashrit, at the autumnal equinox, he is Shamash, "the supreme and equitable judge of heaven and earth," "the director," "the law which binds the obedience of the countrics," the sun of the equinoxes, who equally divides day and night, making a just and moderate use of his power. To him succeeds Maruduk, in the month of Ara'hshamna, by which time the adverse power of the sign of the Scorpion predominates-the month each day of which sees the energy of the sun diminish, and causes him to descend a step towards his annual decline. Maruduk, the adversary of the demons, is consequently, at that time, the sun who is still contending with the progress of the principle of darkness and of winter, but who in the end will succumb in the struggle. He has been chosen to preside over the eighth month (OctoberNovember), as being one of the solar gods whom mythology represents as smitten with a periodical death, each day at the hour of evening, when he, like the Greek Herakles, ascends the funeral pile of the west, and each year at the beginning of the season of winter. Moreover, Nergal, the god of death, whose name primitively signifies in Accadian "the ruler of the tomb," né-urugal, is the god who takes his place and succeeds to his dominion in the month of Kisiliv, "the month of thick clouds or mists,"† the month ending with the winter solstice, the precise period of the annual death of the sun.

These successive links, this course of deterioration, are reflected in the construction of the genealogy of the antediluvian patriarchs of the line of Seth, so far at least as we are able to judge of it in the skeleton state in which it has reached us. But its sense is completely changed. That which was the expression of the phases of the solar revolution in the cycle of the gods of the months, among the Chaldeans-that which in their tradition concerning the antediluvian history was a fatal and chiefly physical evolution of the existence of the world—becomes a purely moral decadence of the whole human race, which "corrupts its way" by sin, ceases to listen to the divine precepts, and by the accumulation of the faults of its free-will excites the wrath of God, bringing upon itself the terrible punishment of the Deluge. The evolution passes into the spiritual order and becomes the occasion of a teaching

Rạp Ủ TỎ TÔI Đépous drapefrai—Laurent. Lyd., De Mens., ii. 44; p. 212, ed. Rother. † In Accadian, itu ganganna.

of the most exalted kind. The symbolical dress has remained the same; but instead of covering, as with the Chaldeans, naturalistic myths, it is the figurative covering of truths of the moral order, freed from all coarse admixture with the physical order. The inspired writers, here as throughout the opening of Genesis, have set the first example of the precept, afterwards to be formulated by St. Basil: they have taken the golden vessels of the Gentiles, to make them serve for the worship of the true God.

Thus, Enoch is no longer-like Maruduk, some of whose features he has retained in his physiognomy-the sun who is still contending against the progress of the power of winter, and who in the end will succumb in the struggle: he is a just man who, alone in his day, "walks with God," whose piety and sanctity contrast with the corruption which reigns already among his contemporaries, even in the chosen line. Therefore he does not remain on earth so long as any other of the Sethite patriarchs, for God translates him out of a world unworthy of him. After his removal corruption reigns on earth without counterpoise, and hastens the divine vengeance. And the last two names in the genealogy of the descendants of Seth, down to the time when justice and piety reappear with Noa'h-the names of the son and grandson of 'Hanoch (Methushela'h and Lamech)-no longer express by their signification anything but ideas of violence analogous to those implied by the names of the descendants of Cain. At this period we even find "the man of God" (Methushaël) in the race of the cursed, corresponding to "the man with the arrow" (Methushela'h), or "the murderous man," registered in the line of the blessed son. There is in this latter contrast-which differs from the respective characters of the rest of the genealogies-something through which we catch sight of a design to exhibit the Sethites as perverting themselves to such a degree as to become worse than even the Cainites.

I will not pursue thesc observations further, having already dwelt too long on them. Our knowledge of the subject as yet presents too many lacunæ to allow us to reconstruct in its entirety a very complicated calendarial system, which certainly goes back to an ancient date, but which, far from being primitive, bears on the contrary the stamp of the refinement of a long sacerdotal culture, to which even several alluvia of artificially-combined legends appear to have contributed. It is sufficient to have shown its existence, and to have settled several points which enable us to understand in part its essential economy. What was important for our subject was to show that the Chaldeans had placed the ten antediluvian patriarchs in ten of the solar mansions, and that there is reason to believe that this conception had exercised an influence on the formation of the list of these patriarchs in the Hebraic tradition, such as it was found and accepted, first by the writer of the Elohistic document, and afterwards by the final editor of Genesis.

An influence certainly Chaldæo-Babylonian had caused this cyclical * Wisd. iv. 10; cf. Ecclus. xliv. 16; Heb. xi. 5.

and calendarial conception to find its way into the Iranian Mazdeism. There it has produced a system of the same nature, but more simple, and using numbers less vast, which we find set forth in the thirty-fourth chapter of the Bundehesh. The twelve millennia among which the

existence of the world is apportioned, down to the final defeat of the evil spirit and the resurrection of the dead, are each placed under the empire of one of the signs of the zodiac. The creation takes place under the Ram, and the first three signs correspond to the first cosmic age of three thousand years which elapsed between the creation of the universe and the formation of man. This latter event takes place at the commencement of the millennium of the Crab, that is to say, of the sign to which in the Biblical genealogy corresponds Enos, the second primordial type of man, the repetition of Adam,-the sign under the auspices of which the Chaldean calendar places the month of "the gift of seed.' The empire of the three signs of the Crab, the Lion, and the Virgin embraces the three thousand years which Gayômaretan and the typical bull pass on the earth, sheltered from the reach of evil. The advent of the power of Angrômainyus marks the opening of the millennium of the sign of the Balance, which was formerly that of the claws of the scorpion, or still earlier that of the first scorpion. The spirit of evil stirs up the scorpion, who smites with death the typical bull, and thirty years afterwards he succeeds in slaying Gayômaretan; the Chaldean epopee of the city of Uruk, in the song corresponding to the same sign, represented its hero as attacked by sickness, in order to be cured of which he was obliged to resort to 'Hasisatra in the place to which the gods had translated the latter that he might live for ever; and at the same time as losing his friend and counsellor Hea-bani, the man-bull, who was smitten with the poisoned sting of a bull-fly (utbukku). In the chronology of the Bundehesh the rest of the millennium thus commenced is filled by the birth of Mashya and Mashyâna, by their first descendants, and by the reign of Yima; yet earlier the whole of it was attributed to Yima,† at the time when he was still regarded as the first man. The millennium of the sign of the Scorpion is taken up by the reign of Azhi-Dahâka, a terrestrial personification of the evil principle. That of the Archer is inaugurated by the defeat of this tyrant by Thractaona, the armed and fighting hero, and ends with the prophetic mission of Zarathustra. The last three millennia, those of the Goat, the Water-bearer, and the Fishes, form the period, not yet ended, of the times subsequent to the revealer of the law, just as, for a Chaldean of the time of Nabukudurriuçur (Nebuchadnezzar), or contemporary with Seleucides, like Berosus, the duration of the post-diluvian mythical ages, and of the fully historic times which had followed them, had not yet exhausted the period of 43,200 years corresponding to the last month of the year and the last sign of the zodiac.

FRANÇOIS LENORMANT.

* In Accadian, shu kulga; of the seed or germ of animated beings, for such is the special meaning of the word kul, the designation of the seed of vegetables in the same language being she. Yesht, xvii. 30.