DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.1021#0367
314 THE MYCENAEAN AGE
Nor would there be aught alien to their feeling in the
prayer Euripides1 puts into the same avengers' mouths : —
" Thou, too, my father, sent to the land of shades by
wicked hands, up and champion thy dear children. Come
with all the dead to aid, with all who helped thee break the
Phrygians' power and all who hate ungodly crime. Dost
hear me, father, victim of my mother's rage ? "
Assuredly a faith, which retained so much vitality in the
unbelieving age of Anaxagoras and Socrates, may well
have flourished in the primitive society whose culture we
are studying. That the worship of the dead actually had
a large place among the Mycenaeans, their tombs bear wit-
ness almost with an audible voice. That it went as far
even as the immolation of human victims, we have reason
to believe; and, with the suttee persisting on the Ganges
down to our own day, we need not stop to moralize about
this prehistoric barbarity. Whether of not this ancestor-
Other Myoe- worship was the root of all their religion, we know
near, cults ^nat other cults came to exist side by side with it.
If Indo-European comparative philology has established one
divine equation, it is that of a Zeus pater — a " sky-father "
— who follows our Aryan progenitors in their dispersion and
whose name continues to be above every name to Hindoo,
Hellene, Roman, and Teuton alike.2 It is this supreme
sky-god we seem to recognize in his primitive Aryan char-
acter on the Great Signet from Mycenae; and, if the My-
cenaean could really claim an Aryan birthright in blood
and faith and speech, it is there in the open sky and with
those attributes of aegis and lightning-spear and axe he
would conceive him, and by that name he would invoke
1 Electra, 677 S., tr. E. P. Coleridge.
2 Cf. Schrader, I. c. 419; Sanskrit, Dyaus pita ; Greek, Ze&r iraxjjp; Latin,
Jit'piter ; Teutonic, Tiu, Zio ; Indo-Eur., Djeus.
Nor would there be aught alien to their feeling in the
prayer Euripides1 puts into the same avengers' mouths : —
" Thou, too, my father, sent to the land of shades by
wicked hands, up and champion thy dear children. Come
with all the dead to aid, with all who helped thee break the
Phrygians' power and all who hate ungodly crime. Dost
hear me, father, victim of my mother's rage ? "
Assuredly a faith, which retained so much vitality in the
unbelieving age of Anaxagoras and Socrates, may well
have flourished in the primitive society whose culture we
are studying. That the worship of the dead actually had
a large place among the Mycenaeans, their tombs bear wit-
ness almost with an audible voice. That it went as far
even as the immolation of human victims, we have reason
to believe; and, with the suttee persisting on the Ganges
down to our own day, we need not stop to moralize about
this prehistoric barbarity. Whether of not this ancestor-
Other Myoe- worship was the root of all their religion, we know
near, cults ^nat other cults came to exist side by side with it.
If Indo-European comparative philology has established one
divine equation, it is that of a Zeus pater — a " sky-father "
— who follows our Aryan progenitors in their dispersion and
whose name continues to be above every name to Hindoo,
Hellene, Roman, and Teuton alike.2 It is this supreme
sky-god we seem to recognize in his primitive Aryan char-
acter on the Great Signet from Mycenae; and, if the My-
cenaean could really claim an Aryan birthright in blood
and faith and speech, it is there in the open sky and with
those attributes of aegis and lightning-spear and axe he
would conceive him, and by that name he would invoke
1 Electra, 677 S., tr. E. P. Coleridge.
2 Cf. Schrader, I. c. 419; Sanskrit, Dyaus pita ; Greek, Ze&r iraxjjp; Latin,
Jit'piter ; Teutonic, Tiu, Zio ; Indo-Eur., Djeus.