changes and chances allotted by them to each human life. Another cause of the gradual disuse of the methods and forgetfulness of the meanings of the ancient histories, was the introduction of annals in which the national scribes recorded the events of successive years, characterising each year by some remarkable event occurring in it, or by its place in the years of the reigns of their kings. These annals formed the groundwork of the national chronicles of the Babylonians, Assyrians and Egyptians, and to make their records complete imaginary figures, which sometimes, like those of the Ten Kings of Babylon, reproduced astronomical computations, were assigned to the reigns of pre-annalistic rulers, whose names had been symbols in the pre-solar histories. This introduction of annalistic chronicles separates the age when history was told in symbolic stories depicting the institutions, customs and daily lives of the people who framed them, from that of modern history, which gives us detailed biographies of individuals, kings, warriors and lawgivers, but which, until recently, almost ignored the social movements they directed and the influence they exercised over the progress of the people whom they ruled. Under these influences the old system of recording the lapse of past time by the apparent movements of the stars, sun, and moon round the Pole, the changes in the Pole Stars and the month by stations of the sun and moon in the zodiacal circle, were discarded and almost forgotten in popular ritual. The stories of the old gods recording the sequence of natural phenomena, the conclusions of primitive science, and the history of the past as told in the astronomical succession of different methods of reckoning the year, became in the new literature narratives of somewhat superhuman magnified men and women. They were thus so distorted that when their original forms and meanings were forgotten, they seemed to describe the gods of our forefathers as monsters of iniquity. Hence the divine origin of this mythology was disbelieved by the philosophical teachers of the new spiritual religion based on the study of the mental and moral faculties and the standard of duty they taught. And they like Plato denounced the ancient myths as blasphemous lies invented by the poets, and banished the works in which they were used as dramatic plots from the curriculum of their ideal schools 1. It is only by a study of the old rituals, tribal and local customs and institutions, religious and historical myths, the stages of advance in the knowledge and practice of methods of government, agriculture, fruit-growing, pharmacy, architecture and mechanical arts, and the development of international trade by land and sea, that we can correct these erroneous interpretations of ancient mythology, and reproduce a correct picture of life in the ancient world. In doing this we interpret the old national histories in the sense in which they were composed by the national historiographers, the Pra-shastri or teachingpriests of the Hindus, the Asipu or interpreters of the Akkadians, who became the Semitic Rabbi, the Exegetæ of the Greeks, and the Druid bard-priests of the Celts. These were prepared with careful deliberation and enquiry and with scrupulous regard to the truths as believed in by their authors, and they were handed down to their successors as divinely inspired lessons teaching them the methods by which national prosperity was secured and the faults by which it was lost. We must no longer look on these old mythologies as unintelligible records of a time when, as some assert, men deliberately cultivated the mythopæic art of compiling national stories as a means of amusement, answering to the most frivolous of our modern novels, but as the solemnly recorded teachings of ancestors who bequeathed these symbolic histories to their descendants for their instruction and guidance. I have tried in this work to set forth their true meaning as far as they record the methods of computing time, and the attempts made in the past to find out the real nature of the creating powers who ordained natural and moral laws, and 1 Jowett, Plato, The Republic, Book ii. vol. iii. pp. 249–257. 616 History and Chronology of the Myth-Making Age. I only hope that I may have succeeded in stimulating others to work in this field of research, in which innumerable discoveries can yet be made by those who read, interpret and edit the numerous works which were once the sources whence ancient sages drew their lore, but which now only exist as almost neglected manuscripts. It is not only from these that additional knowledge is to be gained, but also from the buried relics of the ancient and unexplored cities of India, of the countries on the shores of the Indian Ocean, and between the Mediterranean on the West and the Caspian Sea and the Euphrates Valley on the East. There, and also in Europe, are many sites which will, when thoroughly excavated, furnish harvests of relics no less valuable than those which have revealed to us so much of the previously obliterated history of Babylonia, Assyria and Egypt. It is in India that we shall find in the ruins of such cities as those of Pushkala-vasti, or Hastinapore in the Swat valley, in Taxila or Takshasila, Kapila-vastu, Mathura and many others, authentic records of the rule of the Kushika, Khati or Hittite merchant-kings, and probably recover pre-Sanskrit tablets in the ancient Hittite syllabic alphabet. This must certainly have been used in the country in combination with the indigenous methods of preserving and transmitting oral records committed to memory by successive generations of pupils and teachers. 27. Uttara Bhadrapada. y Pegasi or a Andromeda. Ś Piscium. I 1 J. Burgess, C.I.E., Hindu Astronomy,' J.R.A.S., Oct., 1893, p. 756. |