with three personages and a Greek inscription engraved upon it, is mentioned by Mortillet.[1] It seems to reproduce a Mithraic[2] scene. A perforated axe, with a Chaldæan[3] inscription upon it, is in the Borgia collection, and has been figured and described by Lenormant.
Curiously enough, the hatchet appears in ancient times to have had some sacred importance among the Greeks. It was from a hatchet that, according to Plutarch,[4] Jupiter Labrandeus received that title; and M. de Longpérier[5] has pointed out a passage, from which it appears that Bacchus was in one instance, at all events, worshipped under the form of a hatchet, or πέλεκυς. He has also published a Chaldæan cylinder on which a priest is represented as making an offering to a hatchet placed upright on a throne, and has shown that the Egyptian hieroglyph for Nouter, God, is simply the figure of an axe.
In India the hammer was the attribute of the god Indra[6] as Vágrâkarti. A similar worship appears to have prevailed in the North. Saxo Grammaticus mentions that the Danish prince Magnus Nilsson, after a successful expedition against the Goths, brought back among his trophies some Thor's hammers, "malleos joviales," of unusual weight, which had been objects of veneration in an island in which he had destroyed a temple. In Brittany the figures of stone celts are in several instances engraved on the large stones of chambered tumuli and dolmens.
There are two[7] deductions which may readily be drawn from the facts just stated; first, that in nearly, if not, indeed, all parts of the globe which are now civilized, there was a period when the use of stone implements prevailed; and, secondly, that this period is so remote, that what were then the common implements of every-day life have now for centuries been regarded with superstitious reverence, or as being in some sense of celestial origin, and not the work of man's hands.
Nor was such a belief even in Europe, and in comparatively modern times, confined to the uneducated. On the contrary, Mercati,[8] physician to Clement VIII., at the end of the sixteenth
- ↑ Matériaux, vol. iv. p. 9.
- ↑ Mat., vol. xi. p. 538.
- ↑ Mat., vol. xiv. p. 274. Bull. della Comm. Arch. Comunal. di Roma, 1870.
- ↑ "Quæst. Græc," ed. 1624, p. 301.
- ↑ Congrès Intern. d'Anth. et d'Arch. Préh., 1867, pp. 39, 40.
- ↑ Kruse, "Necroliv.," Nachtrag, p. 21. Journ. As. Soc. Beng., vol. v. p. 34.
- ↑ See also Tylor, l. c., p. 228.
- ↑ "Metallotheca Vaticana," p. 242. De Rossi, "Scoperte Paleoetnol.," 1867, p. 11. Mat., vol. x. p. 49.
