grinding of corn in the mill and the scattering of the seed. It seems worth suggesting that the mock king who was annually killed at the Babylonian festival of the Sacaea on the 16th of the month Lous may have represented Thammuz himself. For the historian Berosus, who records the festival and its date, probably used the Macedonian calendar, since he dedicated his history to Antiochus Soter; and in his day the Macedonian month Lous appears to have corresponded to the Babylonian month Thammuz.[1] If this conjecture is right, the view that the mock king at the Sacaea was slain in the character of a god would be established.
There is a good deal more evidence that in Egypt the slain corn-spirit—the dead Osiris—was represented by a human victim, whom the reapers slew on the harvest-field, mourning his death in a dirge, to which the Greeks, through a verbal misunderstanding, gave the name of Maneros,[2] For the legend of Busiris seems to preserve a reminiscence of human sacrifices once offered by the Egyptians in connection with the worship of Osiris. Busiris was said to have been an Egyptian king who sacrificed all strangers on the altar of Zeus. The origin of the custom was traced to a barrenness which afflicted the land of Egypt for nine years. A Cyprian seer informed Busiris that the barrenness would cease if a man were annually sacri-
- ↑ For this fact of the probable correspondence of the months, which supplies so welcome a confirmation of the conjecture in the text, I am indebted to my friend Professor W. Robertson Smith, who furnishes me with the following note: “In the Syro-Macedonian calendar Lous represents Ab, not Tammuz. Was it different in Babylon? I think it was, and one month different, at least in the early times of the Greek monarchy in Asia, For we know from a Babylonian observation in the Almagest (Ideler, i. 396) that in 229 B.C. Xanthicus began on February 26. It was therefore the month before the equinoctial moon, not Nisan but Adar, and consequently Lous answered to the lunar month Tammuz.”
- ↑ Above, p. 364.
