Cook, Arthur B.: Zeus: a study in ancient religion (Band 1): Zeus god of the bright sky (Cambridge, 1914)

io The Transition from Sky to Sky-god

are not in the habit of erecting images, temples, or altars ; indeed,
they charge those who do so with folly, because—I suppose—they
do not, like the Greeks, hold the gods to be of human shape.
Their practice is to climb the highest mountains and sacrifice to
Zeus, by which name they call the whole circle of the sky1. They
sacrifice also to the sun and moon, the earth, fire and water, and
the winds. These, and these alone, are the original objects of
their worship.' The same stage of belief has left many traces of
itself in the Latin language and literature2. To quote but a single
example, a popular line of Ennius ran:

Look at yonder Brilliance o'er us, whom the world invokes as Jove3.

There can be little doubt that in this expressive sentence the
poet has caught and fixed for us the religious thought of the

1 Hdt. r. 131 ot 8e vofxi^ovai Ad p.kv eVt rd vxprjXoTaTa tQjv ovpeuv avafiaipovres dvaLas
£pbei.v, tov kijkXov irdvTa rod ovpavov Ala KaXeovras.

My friend the Rev. Prof. J. H. Moulton, our greatest authority on early Persian
beliefs, in a very striking paper 1 Syncretism in Religion as illustrated in the History of
Parsism' (Transactions of the Third International Congress for the History of Religions
Oxford 1908 ii. 89 ff.) observes a propos of this passage: "It is generally assumed that he
[i.e. Herodotos] calls the supreme deity 'Zeus' merely from his Greek instinct. But it is
at least possible that he heard in Persia a name for the sky-god which sounded so much
like 'Zeus,' being in fact the same word, that he really believed they used the familiar
name. (The suggestion occurred to me [J.H.M.] independently, but it was anticipated by
Spiegel, Eran. Alt. ii. 190.) This incidentally explains why the name 'fipo^adcrSr/s
(Auramazda) does not appear in Greek writers until another century has passed. In
Yt. iii. 13 (a metrical passage, presumably ancient) we find patat^ dyaos...Anro Mainytis,
'Angra fell jrom heaven-1: see Bartholomae, s.v. dyav. Since Dyaus survives in the
Veda as a divine name as well as a common noun—just as dies and Diespiter in Latin—
it is antecedently probable that the Iranians still worshipped the ancestral deity by his
old name." Prof. Moulton further writes to me (June 23, 1911) that Herodotos 'is
entirely right, as usual: his general picture of Persian religion agrees most subtly with
what we should reconstruct on other evidence as the religion of the people before
Zarathushtra's reform began to affect them. It is pure Aryan nature-worship—and
probably pure Indogermanic ditto—, prior alike to the reform of Z. on the one side
and the Babylonian contamination that produced Mithraism on the other.'

Auramazda appears in later Greek authors as Zeus jxeyiaTos (Xen. Cyr. 5. 1. 29, cp.
pseudo-Kallisthen. 1. 40) or Zeus /SacrtXeus (Xen. Cyr. 3. 3. 21, 7. 5. 57, anab. 3. r. 12,
6. r. 22, Arrian. 4. 20. 3 iirl rotcrSe avareivcu. Aapeiov is tov ovpavov rds %et/)as /cat ev^atrdcu
w5e * 'AXX' to Zeu /3acrtXeu, 6'rw eVtrerpaTrrat vefxeiv rd fiacnXiwv wpdy/xara ev avdpdoirois,
k.t.X. = Souid. s.v. 'AXi^av8pos) or Zeus /cat 'Qpop,dcrSr)s (Aristot. frag. 8 Rosea/. Diog.
Laert. promn. 8) or Zeus 'iipo/j.daSr]s (Michel Recueil d'lnscr. gr. no. 735 = Dittenberger
Orient. Gr. inscr. sel. no. 383, 41 f. irpbs ovpavlovs Atos | 'Upo/xdcrSov Opovovs, 54 Atos re
'^Ipofxdadov k.t.X.). Cp. Agathias hist. 2. 24 to fxev yap 7raXat6;> Ata re /cat Kpovov /cat
tovtovs 5rj dVa^ras tovs Trap' "EXX^crt dpvXXovfJLevovs eTLjxwv (sc. ot Tle/xrat) deotis, irXr)v ye
otl dr] avTois rj irpoayjyopia ou% o^otws ecrtofero, dXXd B^Xo^ fxev top Ala tvxov ~2du87]j> re
tov 'Hpa/cXea /cat 'Aratrtcia tt\v 'A<ppo8iT7]v /cat dXXws tovs aXXovs eKaXovv.

2 I have collected the evidence in Folk-Lore 1905 xvi. 260 ff.

8 Ennius ap. Cic. de nat. deor. 2. 4 and 65 aspice hoc sublime candens, quern
invocant omnes Iovem.