BABYLON AND PERSIA

40 MEDIA, BABYLON, AND PERSIA.it is the natural business of Light to conquer Dark¬ness of Wind and Storm to gather the clouds drivenout of sight by the fiends of Drought, and to pourdown rain. Hence the Aryas' simple and manly at¬titude towards their deities: praise, thanksgivingand prayers for help, and a religion so plain andtransparent that a sketch of it can be given in a very\ '^There are few facts better established than this,-that the oldest known and most exalted Aryangod is Heaven, the luminous, the earth-enclosing.His name in the Sanskrit of the Rig-Veda-which isolder than that of any other Sanskrit literature isDy^US and, at a somewhat later period, Varuna.Both names originally are really common nounsand mean the same thing. For DyauS is the wordused in Sanskrit to designate the visible Sky, whileVARUNA, in a slightly altered form-OURANOS-tothis day means "Sky "or "Heaven m Greek._ Itis clear that these names carry us back to the prime¬val Aryan times, the times when those detachmentsdeparted which reached Europe in their wanderings.Althou-h the Indo-Eranian religion was franklypolytheistic, yet a certain supremacy seems to haveAttached to the Sky-god, and he is pre-eminently en¬titled, in the oldest portions of the Rig, both underthe name of Dyaus and that of VaruNA, Asura-" Lord " Varuna frequently also receives the epi¬thet of All-Knowing, Omniscient. The sun is hiseve Fire, in its celestial lightning form, is his son, andthe 'visible starry sky is his royal robe. Forhe is farfrom being a mere personification of a physical fact.