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294
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
(JULY, 1903.
rise to serious doubts. The connection of the seven revolving heavenly bodies with the seven most exalted divinities is not so ancient as is supposed, and their identification has never been made out. Seven highest gods existed much earlier. Besides, the pumber is not Semitic by origin. It is Sumerie ; and in all probability it is an idea as much belonging to the Sumerians as the pre-Semitic nations of West Asia. The sacred number of the Semites was three and also four, but their holiest was the product of the two or twelve. These they discarded in favor of the Sumerian seven, and probably the East Aryans, too, were indebted for it directly to the Sumerian. It is of a trutb remarkable that to the Aryans or Indo-Germans the number seven has had little import. And the Aryans of the Indo-Germans came in contact neither with the Sumerian nor with the Semites.
Beyond these seven, the East Aryans had withal other divinities, the wind-god Vayu, the belligerent god of heaven, the dragon-smiter Vstrahan, who reappears among the Indians a3 Indra and revives among the Persians as the genius of triumph, Verethraghna, and who is not always distinct from Tishtar (the latter's identification with the star Sirius cannot be aboriginal); anil Armaiti who is represented in the Veda and the Avesta as the divine personification of piety and the head of the material world, and whom Zarathushtrians received among the satellites of Ahura Mazda, but who is not reckoned in India among the Adityas. Dyaus, too, must have been worshipped, otherwise the Vedic Indian wonld not have preserved the memory of him.
There are unmistakable marks which point to the cognisance of East Aryans with demi-gods or heroes, if many of them were not already deities, who at & subsequent age were degraded in rank. This fate may have befallen Trita Aptya or Traitans, the Thrita or Thraetona Athwya of the Avesta, originally the same water-god, or rather the god of light contending in the heavenly waters; witness the resemblance of their names and the change of their rôles. And a like fall was not impossibly piperienced by others of the heavenly beings. To the minor divine creatures belong Manu, the lumiferons god and father of mankind, of whom the Veda has a vivid recollection, and the Avesta a fainter one in Manus-Chithra ; Yama, in a measure a duplicate of the preceding, wbom as Yima he wholly ousted in the Aresta, - a mythical king of the primordial humanity since perished, and the judge of the dead; Kșcashva-Keresaspa, the vanquisher of monsters like Thraetona, and mentioned as his son in the legend; finally, Kțshand-Keresani, the archer who watches over the ambrosia and discharges his darts at him who would rifle the same for humanity. Besides, the much older and universally spread legends which Herodotus transfers to Cyrus the Great must already at this period have assumed the shape they present to the Indian and the Iranian. Furthermore, holy minstrels or sages were spoken of as a class of seers or sorcerers (Ravi, Kavya, Kavan), who were endowed with supernatural prescience, and from which class the later Persian tradition has derived an tatire line of sovereigns. Of these were the sapient Ushapas (Kava Usa or Usadhan), his son-in-law Yayati, and his grandson Sushravas (Husravangh). The Indiaus recognize Ushanas as the magician preceptor of the Asuras, he who forged weapons for Soma and Indra and who awakes the dead. With the Iranians, he dominates the demons and makes an unsuccessful attempt at a journey to heaven. This journey the Indians attribute to Yayati. Husravangba is the prince of adventurers, and, in Iran, arenges the death of his grandfather on the Toranian miscreant Franrase. The basis of this folklore must have lain in a period preceding the East Aryan, that is, in old Aryan times, for we are spontaneously put in mind of Daedalus and Wieland the smith.71 If such cunning wizards were reverenced, there were others, fabulous male enchanters called Yatus, whose machinations men
The form of the name in the Aresta is Armaiti, but the metre teaches that it must have been pronounced, also, Aramaiti in the G4tkas. Tie traditional significance of the word is in two places in the Rig Veda , as in the Avesta, "the earth." It ia not relevant here if this interpretation of Sayana is correct. It only shows that people still held fast to this sense even in India.
To About the Vedio Puradhi and the Avestaio Parendi or Parendi, whose identity has been doubled by many, and, among others, by Spiegel, Die Arische Periode, p. 208 seq., compare Pinchel in the Vadische Studion, I. 205, who holds them to be identical and explains as the "fruitful." Tradition accords her dominions over the shades.
11 Roth in 2. D. M. G., II. 223.
Spiegel, Beiträge, IV., 41 meg., and Arische Periode, pp. 281-287
