Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/436

A History of Art in Chai.d.ka and Assyria. to Phoenicia or Palestine, to Athens or Rome, we are constantly met by the sexagesimal system of the Babylonians. The measure- ments of time and of the diurnal passage of the sun employed by all those peoples, were founded on the same divisions and borrowed from the same inventors. It is to the same people that we owe our week of seven days, which, though not at first adopted by the western nations, ended by imposing itself upon them. 1 As for astronomy, from a period far away in the darkness of the past it seems to have been a regular branch of learning in Chaldaea ; the Greeks knew very little about it before the conquests of Alexander ; it was more than a century after the capture of Babylon by the Macedonians that the famous astrological tables were first utilized by Hipparchus. 2 In the sequel we shall come upon further borrowings and connections of this kind, whose interest and importance has never been suspected by the historian until within the last few r years. Take the chief gods and demi-gods to whom the homage of the peoples of Syria and Asia Minor was paid, and you will have no difficulty in acknowledging that, although their names were often changed on the way, Mesopotamia was the starting place of them all. By highways of the sea as well as those on land, the peoples established on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean entered into relations with the tribes of another race who dwelt on the European coasts of the same sea ; they introduced them to their divinities and taught them the rites by which those divinities were honoured and the forms under which they were figured. Without abandoning the gods they worshipped in common with their brother Aryans, the Greeks adopted more than one of these Oriental deities. This is not the place to consider the question in detail. We must put aside for the present both the Cybele of Cappadocia and Phrygia and that Ephesian Artemis, who, after being domiciled and naturalized in one of the Hellenic capitals, so obstinately and so long preserved her foreign characteristics ; we must for the moment forget Aphrodite, that goddess of a different fortune whose name is enough to call up visions of not a few masterpieces of classic art and poetry. Does not all that we know of this daughter of the sea, of her journeys, 1 Fr. Lenormant, Manuel d 'Histoire ancienne, vol. ii. page 176. SoURY, Theories naturalistes, p. 65.