SYRO-HITTITE DEITY IN A CHARIOT. B10 
other a short sword. Another of the same type is shown in fig. 981. The rider, 
the horses, and the chariot are the same, but a single tall warrior follows with a 
short sword and running swiftly. His is a short garment, unlike the long robe of 
the presumed goddess. Above are two Egyptian vultures and below are three 
double scrolls. ‘This is evidently of an Egyptian style and, indeed, in both cases, 
the workmanship is superior to that in the seals which show the goddess in the 
four-wheeled chariot, so that these are more closely connected with the better Syro- 
Hittite style. 
That this represents a deity and not a human warrior is rendered probable 
by fig. 982 where the beardless figure, presumably a goddess, is drawn by lions, 
which seem to relate her to Ishtar, or Astarte. Behind her chariot are two marching 
figures with headdresses of asps. ‘The style is Egyptian, and so probably early. 
In the much later art the Phrygian goddess Ma, or Kybele, the turret-crowned 
Magna Mater of Pessinus, was drawn by lions, much in this style, in her search 
for her son Attis (Roscher, “Kybele,” cols. 1651, 1671); and in Lucian “De Dea 
Syria”’ we are told that the goddess of Hierapolis was drawn by two lions. Ishtar 
of Nineveh was drawn by seven lions (Boscawen, Oriental and Babylonian Record, 
VILL pets]: 
For cylinders which give us not deities, but scenes distinctly of history or 
fighting from a chariot, see Chapter LVIII. 
But we have in the Egyptian mythology and art what we may regard as well- 
nigh conclusive eyidence that the goddess in the chariot is the Syrian Ashtoreth, 
or Ishtar (Astarte). Among the Syrian gods carried into Egypt and worshiped 
and figured there was Astharthet, called “Mistress of the horses, Lady of the 
Chariot” (Budge, “The Gods of the Egyptians,” 11, p. 278), and figured driving 
in a chariot over prostrate foes (fig. 983). After their manner the Egyptians gave 
her the head of a lion, and we remember the relation of Ishtar to a lion in both 
the Babylonian and Assyrian art. Indeed in another form of Ishtar in Egypt she 
stands on a lion, as in fig. 775. We have seen her drawn by lions after the better 
Syrian convention in fig. 982. 
It may be noticed that we have here in Syria the four-horse team, attached to 
a four-wheeled chariot. In Ridgeway’s “Origin and Influence of the Thorough- 
bred Horse,” p. 251, it is said that ‘the four-horse chariot does not seem to have 
been employed by any of the peoples of Upper Europe, by Vedic Aryans, Persians, 
Assyrians, Canaanites, or Egyptians,’ but was introduced by the Greeks from 
Libya in the seventh century B. C. But we have here the four-horse chariot used 
for purposes of state, but with racing horses, at a period probably considerably 
earlier. 
