f)4 The Birds of the Assyrian Monuments and Records. 
lore of many nations : plain facts regarding the appearance 
or habits of animals, mixed up with fanciful and superstitious 
notions held concerning them. " Zoological Mythology " is 
full of such instances. The same animal is at one time a 
foreteller of prosperity, at another of evil, according to the 
ideas which have been suggested to the primitive but 
imaginative mind of man, dependent on certain phenomena 
which occur in connection with the animal, either in respect 
of its peculiar form or colour, the noise emitted by it, the time 
of its emission, be it at early dawn, middle day, at sun-set, 
or at midnight, or as relates to its periodic appearance or 
disappearance at certain times of the year ; or, in the case of 
birds, according to the mode of flight, whether to the right 
hand or to the left of the observer. A few instances will serve 
by way of illustration. The swallow, in Aryan mythology, 
as the joyful herald of spring and fertility, is regarded as a 
propitious bird ; towards the winter season it is of sinister 
omen, as foretelling the approach of the cold and inclement 
season. The same may be said of the stork and the cuckoo 
and other migratory birds. The turtle dove as emblematic 
of spring is a bird of good omen; as being of a sombre 
hue, it is a funereal bird in the Rigvedas, the grey colour 
signifying the nocturnal or wintry darkness : see "Zoological 
Mythology," by Prof. A. de Gubernatis (II, p. 226), to which 
work the reader is referred for numerous illustrations of 
the same ideas. Now with respect to this double aspect 
of the Great Eagle Owl, the essepu and its-tsur li-mut-ti of 
the Assyrian records, the same occurs in ancient Aryan 
mythology, and the idea has persisted, and still exists, in 
the traditional natural history lore of some of the nations of 
western Europe. The owl, from its hootings or other cries 
emitted during the night, is still in Hungary called the "bird 
of death"; in the Rigvedas the devotee is ordered to curse 
death and the angel of death, "to conjure them away," when 
he hears the painful cry of this monster that wanders in the 
night; thus reminding us of the passage already alluded to 
in the tablet concerning evil spirits, where the essebu, or 
"bird of the god so-and-so," figures as an evil incubus on 
the inhabitants of cities or villages, as well as to the con- 
