Discovery of Horse-heads. By Dr. E. C. Kobertson. 517 



To interpret the signification of these designs we must go to 

 India, where we shall find that *' Indra is the son of Dyaus, the 

 gleaming heaven, and he is seen in the dazzling orb, which seems 

 to smite the thunder clouds and compel them to give up their 

 prey. In his hands he holds a golden whip, and he is borne 

 across the heavens in a flaming chariot, drawn by the tawny 

 steeds, the Harits." Thus Indra is the Indian sun-god, who 

 drives with his horses through the heavens. As the bringer of 

 the rain and also of the harvest, he is the god, whose power is 

 most earnestly invoked by his Hindu worshippers. The sun 

 symbolises creative power, the horses the sun's rays. 



On the first coin we have the horse, in the sky, surrounded by 

 or rather among stars and clouds, having a bird's head, with a 

 seed in its bill, symbolic of the first creation or of the yearly pro- 

 duction of the vegetable world, scattering seeds that the earth 

 may " bring forth grass and herb, yielding seed, after its kind." 

 He has the wheel, emblem of the sun at his side.* 



On the second, the winged horse is figurative of the sun pass- 

 ing through the sky. 



On the third, the horse is depicted human-headed to imply in- 

 telligence and mind — he is not self -impelled in his career, but 

 is driven by Indra, the sun-god himseK. The man prostrate 

 under the horse, shows that the horse with its driver is careering 

 over man above the earth. 



The horse and wheel being figurative of the sun rolling in his 

 course through the space of heaven, we have in them a type of 

 the earliest and nearly universal worship of that orb as creator, 

 by its light and heat calling the herb into being. More correct- 

 ly the adoration may be regarded as the worship of the visible 

 sign of the unseen First Great Cause, the luminary being in its 

 glory the symbol of life and a manifestation of God himself — in 

 its setting typical of death and burial, in its rising of the resur- 

 rection. In the worship of the Parsis, Mithras is the angel, pre- 

 siding over the sun, sometimes the sun himself. In the " Nihvi- 

 Yasht", Ahuramazda (First Cause) says " I created Mithra, who 

 rules over large fields, to be of the same rank and dignity as I 



* In the island of Mull, in 1767, in consequence of a disease among cat- 

 tle, a wheel was turned from east to west, until the needed fire was produced. 

 On the Moselle, so late as 1823, a huge wheel bound with straw, was set on 

 fire and rolled down hill, an invocation that the summer might be hot 

 and the vintage consequently generous. 



