Zeus : a study in ancient religion - Warburg Institute

io The Transition from Sky to Sky-god
are not in the habit of erecting images, temples, or altars ; indeed,
they charge those who do so with folly, because— I suppose — they
do not, like the Greeks,. hold the gods to be of human shape.
Their practice is to climb the highest mountains and sacrifice to
Zeus, by which name they call the whole circle of the sky 1
. They
sacrifice also to the sun and moon, the earth, fire and water, and
the winds. These, and these alone, are the original objects of
their worship.' The same stage of belief has left many
itself in the Latin language and literature 2 . To
example, a popular
line of Ennius ran :
traces of
quote but a single
Look at yonder Brilliance o'er us, whom the world invokes as Jove 3 .
There can be little doubt that in this expressive sentence the
poet has caught and fixed for us the religious thought
of the
1 Hdt. I. 131 ol de vofiifrovat Ad p&v ewl to, vrf/rfK&rara tQ>v ovptuiv dvafialvovres dvalas
tpbeiv, tov k6k\ov irdvra tov ovpavov Ala KaXewras.
My friend the Rev. Prof. J. H. Moulton, our greatest authority on early Persian
Syncretism in Religion as illustrated in the History of
beliefs, in a very striking paper '
Parsism '
(Transactions of the Third International Congress for the History of Religions
Oxford ii. 1908 89 ff.) observes a propos of this passage: "It is generally assumed that he
from his Greek instinct. But it is
[i.e. Herodotos] calls the supreme deity 'Zeus' merely
at least possible that he heard in Persia a name for the sky-god which sounded so much
like 'Zeus,' being in fact the same word, that he really believed they used the familiar
name. (The suggestion occurred to me [J.H.M.] independently, but it was anticipated by
Spiegel, Eran. Alt. ii. 190.) This incidentally explains why the name 'ilpofido-brjs
(Auramazda) does not appear in Greek writers until another century has passed. In
Yt. iii. 13 (a metrical passage, presumably ancient) we find patat dyao"s...Anrb~ Mainyus,
'Angra fe\\ jrom heaven': see Bartholomae, s.v. dyav. Since Dyaus survives in the
Veda as a divine name as well as a common noun— just as dies and Diespiter in Latin—
it is antecedently probable that the Iranians still worshipped the ancestral deity by his
old name." Prof. Moulton further writes to me (June 23, 191 1) that Herodotos 'is
entirely right, as usual : his general picture of Persian religion agrees most subtly with
what we should reconstruct on other evidence as the religion of the people before
Zarathushtra's reform began to affect them. It is pure Aryan nature-worship —and
probably pure Indogermanic ditto— , prior
alike to the reform of Z. on the one side
and the Babylonian contamination that produced Mithraism on the other.'
Auramazda appears in later Greek authors as Zeus fityurros (Xen. Cyr. 5. 1. 29, cp.
pseudo-Kallisthen. 1. 40) or Zeus /3a avdpihwots,
k.t.X. = Souid. s.v. 'AX^avSpos) or Zeus /cat 'fipo/xdaSris (Aristot. frag. 8 Rose ap. Diog.
Laert. proam. 8) or Zeus 'ilpofidffbrjs (Michel
Orient. Gr. inscr. sel. no. 383, 41 f. irpds ovpavlovs Atds |
Recueil d1
Inscr. gr. no. 735 = Dittenberger
'fipo/xdoSov dpbvovs, 54 At6s re
'ilpo/xdaSov k.t.X.). Cp. Agathias hist. 2. 24 rb fih yap iraXaibv Ala re /cal Kpbvov Kai
toutous 87) airavras tous irap "EWrjffi OpvWov/xivovs £tI/jlwv (sc.
ol Mpcrai) Qeotis, Tr\rji> ye
Sri 8tj aureus 7? irpoariyopla o\>x b/xolws iffu^ero, a\\a Brj\oi> fiev rbv Ala rvxbv 2dt>dT)i> re
''
rbv 'Hpa/cX^a Kai 'Avatrida rr\v A