98 Hie Birds of the Assyrian Monuments and Records, 
Parsees do not eat a cock after it has begun to crow. We 
know that the ancient Romans took augury from cocks and 
young fowls : so we may expect to find this bird figuring in 
the Assyrian records. I do not know, however, of any 
allusion to these birds as birds of augury ; but that they did 
appear in early times on sacrificial occasions is certain, from 
the impression of the conical seal obtained by Sir A. H. 
Layard at Babylon, an engraving of which may be seen in 
Layard's " Nin. and Babyl.," p. 538. The seal is " an agate 
cone, upon the base of which is engraved a winged priest or 
deity, standing in an attitude of prayer before a cock on an 
altar ; above the group is the crescent moon." 
There is a cylinder in the British Museum in which there 
is a subject very similar. "A priest, wearing the sacri- 
ficial dress, stands at a table before an altar bearing a 
crescent, and a smaller altar, on which stands a cock." The 
Hebrew commentators thought that Nergal, the idol of the 
men of Cuth, had the form of the cock, writes Layard, refer- 
ring to Selden, " De Dis Syris," p. 251. I may mention that 
Montfaucon, in his "Antiquities," gives a similar sacrificial 
representation in the plate " Duodecim Anni Menses," where 
Januarius is depicted as a priest burning incense on one altar, 
and having on his left hand another conical shaped altar, a cock 
standing at his feet. We know that fowls played an important 
part as birds of augury. As Pliny (" Nat. Hist.," x, 21) says, 
it is from the feeding of these birds that the omens are 
derived, "tripudia solistima ; it is these which regulate day 
by day the movements of our magistrates, and open or shut 
to them their own houses ; it is these that command battles 
or forbid them, and furnish auspices for victories to be gained 
in every part of the world ; it is these that hold supreme rule 
over those who are themselves the rulers of the earth, and 
whose entrails and fibres are as pleasing to the gods as the 
first spoils of victory." It is not improbable that the sacrificial 
rites and consultation by augury, in which cocks figured 
amongst the Romans, came originally from Babylonia, and 
that as some of the zodiacal signs had their earliest origin in 
Babylonia, so the sacred rites connected with the Roman 
months had some of them a similar origin. I think that 
