170 Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. [N.S., XJTT, 



par excellence. The Greeks have transformed Damiqitou in 

 Aouk^ and the Persians have translated the name in their lan- 

 guage ; but they have changed the attribution and have applied 

 to the planet Venus, on account of its brilliant light, the name 

 of the Chaldean goddess of purity. During the Pahlavi period 

 the name of Venus was Anahita but the modern Persian name is 

 nahid and the Arabic is zahera, which has the same meaning of 

 "brightness." (Drouin, Gazette beige de Numismatique Brux- 

 elles, 1901). 



The moon in the Cuneiform inscriptions milu Sin " the god 

 Sin," in the Avesta it is the god Maonha, which in Persian 

 became Mah. Whether at a remote epoch the Avesta people 

 gave, like the Babylonians, to the moon the precedence over the 

 sun (see Jastrow, Die Religion Babyloniens und Assyriens, 1905, 

 p. 72) cannot be proved from the Avesta. The sun as the orb 

 of the day, giving light and warmth, the moon as the light of 

 the night, regulating the time by its waxing or waning, have 

 from the most ancient times been the object of worship. Both 

 are often invoked in the Avesta. The Khorshed yasht and 

 Khorshed Nyayish are dedicated to the sun, and the Mali 

 Yasht and the Mah Nyayish to the moon. In the writings of 

 the younger Avesta the religion of Zoroaster no longer appears in 

 its original state, but has in the course of time lost a part of its 

 old traditions and taken up various new elements (see Geldner, 

 Ueber die Metrik des jiingeren Avesta, p. IV). It is certain 

 that in the latest times of the Sassanians, who called them- 

 selves brothers of the moon and wore a crescent on their dia- 

 dem, as we see from their coins, the cult of the moon became 

 more and more important. It is indeed possible that the cult 

 of the moon-god was transmitted from Babylonia. A testi- 

 mony to the higher rank of Sin, the moon-god, in Babylon is the 

 computation of time according to the moon-phases the moon 

 being on account of the regularity of its changes a better guide 

 for men than the sun. (See Jastrow, I, pp. 66, 67, 72 and 73). 



Recently Huesing has expressed the opinion (Iranischer 

 Mondkult. Archiv-fiir Religionswissenschaft IV, 349-357) that 

 the moon played a part of considerable importance in the Ira- 

 nian religion. The orb which, in the stereotyped representa- 

 tions in relief of the Achaemenian tombs at Naqsh-i-Rustam , 

 floats in the air above the fire-altar, is, according to him, intend- 

 ed for the moon. In Stolze's well-known work the author 

 believes that he recognises on the first tomb of Persepolis the 

 crescent at the base of the orb. In Dieulafoy's book (L'Art 



icflX*; m i l eT ^' Acaemenides, Parthes, Sassanides, Paris, 

 1884-86 the half-circle, as the author says, may be seen quite 

 distinctly, for example, in Plate IV, Tombeau de Darius. 

 Dieulafoy speaks of it plainly as the «' disque lunaire " (III- 

 partie, p. 4). Hitherto most scholars took this orb or rather 

 globe for an emblem of the sun. Ker-Porter, who visited the 



