DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.9804#0159
CHAPTER IX
CRETE AND THE EAST
" Ex Oriente Lux " is the motto of a brilliant school of
German writers who have done much to interpret for us
the ancient civilisation of Babylonia.1 The motto is at
once a challenge and a claim, and it has already justified
its existence for Greek as well as for Jewish history. It
is the East, for instance, that has explained the mys-
terious Golden Lamb of Atreus and Thyestes. In the
ninth and eighth centuries B.C. the Oriental world saw
a change in the movements of the heavenly bodies which
it naturally associated with another change, historical
and political. At the vernal equinox the sun was then
in the Sign of the Ram, and no longer, as in the past, in
that of the Bull ; and all the time Babylon and its Bull-
God Marduk were declining before the power of Assyria.
Henceforward the coming of the Ram implied to the
Oriental mind change of power.5
So too the idea of the wooden horse in which the
Greeks entered Troy is seen to have been taken from
the tall siege engines of the Assyrians, in which the top
platform swung round on a revolving pivot like an
animal's head and neck, above the level of the walls.
Hence the " leaping " of the wall and the setting down
of the " armed brood " within the city.1
1 It is the actual title of a series edited by Hugo Wincklcr
(Pfeiffer, Leipzig), and is the motto of Fick's V.O.
2 G. G. A. Murray, Euripides Eleclra (Allen, 1905), p. 92, from
Winckler, W.A.O. p. 30, etc.
3 This was, I believe, first suggested by G. G. A. Murray,
Euripides The Trojan Women (Allen, 1905), p. 86.
133
CRETE AND THE EAST
" Ex Oriente Lux " is the motto of a brilliant school of
German writers who have done much to interpret for us
the ancient civilisation of Babylonia.1 The motto is at
once a challenge and a claim, and it has already justified
its existence for Greek as well as for Jewish history. It
is the East, for instance, that has explained the mys-
terious Golden Lamb of Atreus and Thyestes. In the
ninth and eighth centuries B.C. the Oriental world saw
a change in the movements of the heavenly bodies which
it naturally associated with another change, historical
and political. At the vernal equinox the sun was then
in the Sign of the Ram, and no longer, as in the past, in
that of the Bull ; and all the time Babylon and its Bull-
God Marduk were declining before the power of Assyria.
Henceforward the coming of the Ram implied to the
Oriental mind change of power.5
So too the idea of the wooden horse in which the
Greeks entered Troy is seen to have been taken from
the tall siege engines of the Assyrians, in which the top
platform swung round on a revolving pivot like an
animal's head and neck, above the level of the walls.
Hence the " leaping " of the wall and the setting down
of the " armed brood " within the city.1
1 It is the actual title of a series edited by Hugo Wincklcr
(Pfeiffer, Leipzig), and is the motto of Fick's V.O.
2 G. G. A. Murray, Euripides Eleclra (Allen, 1905), p. 92, from
Winckler, W.A.O. p. 30, etc.
3 This was, I believe, first suggested by G. G. A. Murray,
Euripides The Trojan Women (Allen, 1905), p. 86.
133