ZODIACAL SIGNS. 121 



passage, probably falsified by a copyist).* The earliest no- 

 tice of this new constellation occurs in Gemiuus and Yarro 

 scarcely half a century before our era ; and as the Romans, 

 from the time of Augustus to Antoninus, became more strong- 

 ly imbued with a predilection for astrological inquiry, those 

 constellations which " lay in the celestial path of the sun" 

 acquired an exaggerated and fanciful importance The Egyp- 

 tian zodiacal constellations found at Dendera, Esneh, the 

 Propylon of Panopolis, and on some mummy-cases, belong to 

 the first half of this period of the Roman dominion, as was 

 maintained by Visconti and Testa, at a time when the nec- 

 essary materials for the decision of the question had not been 

 collected, and the wildest hypothesis still prevailed regard- 

 ing the signification of these symbolical zodiacal signs, and 

 their dependence on the precession of the equinoxes. • The 

 great antiquity which, from passages in Manu's Book of 

 Laws, Valmiki's Ramayana and Amarasinha's Dictionary, 

 Augustus William von Schlegel attributed to the zodiacal 

 circles found in India, has been rendered very doubtful by 

 Adolph Holtzmann's ingenious investigations.! 



* On the passage referred to in the text, and interpolated by a copy- 

 ist of Hipparchus, see Letronne, Orig. du Zod., 1840, p. 20. As early 

 as 1812, when I was much disposed to believe that the Greeks had 

 been long acquainted with the sign of Libra, I directed attention in an 

 elaborate memoir (on all the passages in Greek and Roman writers of 

 antiquity, in which the Balance occurs as a sign of the zodiac) to that 

 passage in Hipparchus (Comment, in Aratum, lib. iii., cap. 2) which re- 

 fers to the dypiov held by the Centaur (in his fore-foot), as well as to 

 the remarkable passage of Ptolemy, lib. ix., cap. 7 (Halma, t. ii., p. 

 170). In the latter the Southern Balance is named with the affix /card 

 Xahdaiovc, and is opposed to the pincers of the Scorpion in an observ- 

 ation, winch was undoubtedly not made at Babylon, but by some of 

 the astrological Chaldeans, dispersed throughout Syria and Alexandria. 

 ( Vues des Cordilleres et Monumens des Peuples Indigenes de V Ame'rique, 

 t. ii., p. 380.) Buttman maintained, what is very improbable, that the 

 Xn^ at originally signified the two scales of the Balance, and were sub- 

 sequently by some misconception converted into the pincers of a scor- 

 pion. (Compare Ideler, Untersuchungen uber die astronomischen Beo- 

 bachtungen der Alten., s. 374, and Ueber die Sternnamen, s. 174-177, 

 with Carteron, Reckerches de M. Letronne, p. 113.) It is a remarkable 

 circumstance connected with the analogy between many of the names 

 of the twenty-seven " houses of the moon," and the Dodecatomeria of 

 the zodiac, that we also meet with the sign of the Balance among the 

 Indian Nakschatras (Moon-houses), which are undoubtedly of very 

 great antiquity. (Vues des Cordilleres, t. ii., p. 6-12.) 



t Compare A. W. von Schlegel, Ueber Sternbilder des Thierkreises im 



alten Indien, in the Zeitschrift fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes, bd. i., 



Heft 3, 1837, and his Commentatio de Zodiaci Antiquitate et Origint, 



1839, with Adolph Holtzmann, Ueber den Griechischen Ursprung des I* 



Vox HI.— F 



