156 LT.-COL. G. MACK1NLAY ON BIBLICAL ASTRONOMY. 



the Arabs before the time of Mohammed paid their devotions to the 

 planets, stars, and various idols, but many of them at the same 

 time, believed in one Supreme God the Creator and Governor of 

 the Universe, and regarded their other deities rather in the light of 

 intermediaries with the Almighty, and as subsidiary adjuncts of 

 their religion. Mohammed sternly forbade the worship of all but 

 one God, of whom he claimed to be the prophet, and in order to 

 emphasise the absolute nothingness of the other objects of suppli- 

 cation, he, in the fifty-third chapter of the Koran, that sacred book 

 of Islam so largely compiled from the Jewish Scriptures, declared 

 that God is the Lord of the clog-star (Sirius), one of the celestial 

 deities worshipped by the old Arabs. 



The argument may be advanced that anything which obtained 

 at the end of the sixth or the beginning of the seventh centuries of 

 the Christian era had very little connection with systems current in 

 Scriptural ages, but against this contention it may be urged that 

 the East moves slowly, and that the same customs which existed at 

 the commencement of the Hegira (which began July 16, A.D. 622) 

 had probably obtained at least some centuries earlier. 



As the Jews of old announced and celebrated the appearance of 

 the new moon by the blowing of trumpets, and the Hindus in some 

 places practice a similar observance, so the Mohammedans pay 

 particular attention to the same manifestation. Those among us 

 who have had experience of Eastern lands have witnessed the earnest 

 anxiety exhibited for the appearance of the new moon which 

 terminates the terribly severe fast of Ramadan and ushers in the 

 feast of Bairam. Even the first appearance of the ordinary new 

 moon is a cause of joy, and when a few years ago I was residing for 

 a time in one of the protected native states (Bahawalpur) situated 

 in the north-west of India, it was customary for the person who 

 first sighted the Queen of Night, and reported her presence to the 

 Nawab, to receive a present ; then the members of the court 

 tendered their felicitations to their ruler, and a salute of seventeen 

 guns, the number allotted to his highness by the Government of 

 India, was fired in honour of the auspicious occasion. 



It is a difficult point to determine how far the ancient peoples 

 were acquainted with the globular form of the earth. Personally, 

 I am not competent to express any opinion as to the correctness, or 

 otherwise, of translations ; but with respect to the inference drawn 



