Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/832

Rh 782 Z E R Z E U of Zerafshan arc beautiful. A variety of petty trades are carried on in the towns and villages. Zerafshan is divided into three districts, the chief towns of which are Samarkand (36,000 inhabitants), now connected by rail with Bokhara, Merv, and Mikhailovsk on Krasnovodsk Bay in the Cas pian Sea ; Katty-Kurgan (4425), close by the frontier of Bokhara ; and Pendjakent (1880), chief town of the mountain district of the upper Zerafshan, known as Kohistan. ZERBST, a manufacturing town in the duchy of Anhalt, Germany, is situated on the Nuthe, 1 1 miles north west of Dessau and 21 south-east of Magdeburg. It con tains five churches, one of which (St Nicholas), built in 1446-88, is a good example of the Late Gothic style as developed in Saxony, with its spacious proportions, groined vaulting, and bare simple pillars. The town-house dates from about 1480, but it was disfigured by additions in the beginning of the 17th century. The palace (1681- 1750) has been used as a depository of archives since 1872. There are several quaint old houses, with high gables, in the market-place, in the middle of which stand a Roland column, of about 1445, and a bronze figure known as the &quot;Butterjungfer &quot; (butter-girl), of uncertain origin and meaning, but now regarded as the palladium of the town. The old Franciscan monastery, with fine cloisters, founded in 1250, contains the gymnasium; a nunnery of 1214 has been converted into barracks; and the Augustinian monastery of 1390 has been a hospital since 1525. The site of the old fortifications is occupied by pretty pro menades. Gold and silver articles, silk, plush, cloth, leather, soap, starch, chemicals, and carriages are among the chief manufactures. Iron-founding is carried on ; and several breweries are engaged in the preparation of Zerbster bitter beer, which enjoys considerable repute. Market-gardening is also a profitable industry at Zerbst. The population, almost entirely Protestant, was 15,069 in 1885 ; in 1849 it was 9350. Zerbst is an ancient town, mentioned in 949. In 1307 it came into the possession of the Anhalt family, and from 1603 till 1793 was the capital of the collateral branch of Anhalt-Zerbst. In 1793 it passed to Anhalt-Dessau. ZEUS, the chief deity of ancient Greek religion, bears a name which almost certainly means &quot;sky.&quot; His title is identified by etymologists with the Sanskrit Dyaus, the &quot; bright one,&quot; &quot;sky,&quot; though his legend and place in religion are not closely akin to those of the Vedic deity. It seems nearly certain that the peoples who speak Aryan languages had at some remote time a common word for the sky, and nothing can be more probable than that they also worshipped the vault of heaven. In what sense the sky may have been an Aryan deity before the distant and obscure process called the Aryan dispersion, it is not possible with certainty to say. The followers of Mr Herbert Spencer might not inconsistently suppose that there was once an Aryan medicine-man or chief named Sky, and that on his death his ghost was worshipped and his cult finally blended with that of the actual natural phenomenon. Or, again, it might be argued that the sky was originally adored as a symbol of the Infinite, and that men, losing the original conception, and misled by the personal appearance of the name as other words for sky became more familiar, were deceived into the belief that &quot; sky &quot; was a personal deity. Or, once more, theorists might urge that Sky was first worshipped at a stage of early fancy, when all things in nature were looked on as personal and of human parts and passions, while later the sky sank back into the category of lifeless things, leaving Zeus as a distinct personal being and deity. Other hypotheses might, no doubt, be invented, but unhappily we have no means of proving their historical accuracy. It is a common thing among backward races, for example on the Gold Coast, to find Sky worshipped as a god, or regarded as the dwelling-place of gods. How and in what manner such conceptions were attained by the ancestors of the ancient Greeks we can never know as a matter of fact Coining to historical and documentary evidence, our earliest knowledge of Zeus is derived from the Homeric and Hesiodic poems. It is very probable that in the legend and ritual of remote towns and temples in Greece we have traces of a conception of Zeus much older than that which meets us in Homer. But Homer and Hesiod are the most ancient literary testimonies ; next to these come the speculations of the early philosophers and the writings of the lyric poets, Pindar, Herodotus, and the tragedians. Finally, we have the Zeus of the philosophers of the central period, Plato and Aristotle, and the Zeus of the later philosophic periods down to the prevalence of Christianity. By the time that Zeus meets us in Homer he has wandered far from the original conception of him. What ever that may have been, Zeus cannot have been first imagined in an age of advanced society on the heroic system, that is, in an age of the fully developed monogam ous family of city states each governed by a king, and of a general loose confederation, with a kind of upper and lower house, the prince s council and the assembly of the people. It is, however, on the model of such a society that the Olympian consistory is organized in Homer, with Zeus for the bretwalda, the principal chief of the gods. Such a position Zeus holds in Homer. The poet represents him as anthropomorphic, a powerful, humorous, amorous ruler, sometimes troubled by disputes among his younger brethren, Hades and Poseidon, his wife, and his children. His claim to supreme authority is based on primogeniture (II., xv. 187), whereas in Hesiod Zeus is the successful youngest son of Cronus. Both poets agree that he has overthrown the paternal dynasty, and established his own power after violent struggles. The legends in Hesiod are full of ugly and puerile fables and conceits, dating doubtless from remote and uncivilized antiquity. Though Zeus be so much of a magnified man in Homer, there are probably traces of the elemental conception, and his union with Hera (II., xiv. 152) on the crest of Ida may be a poetic memory of the old story of Heaven wedding Earth, though Hera cannot as a rule be regarded as a form of Gtea or of Demeter. While among the gods Zeus is a father, brother, and emperor, Homeric men sometimes use his name as we might use that of God, in a religious rather than in a mythological sense. Now regarded as subject to Fate, so that he cannot save even his own children from her decree, elsewhere he seems to hold the gifts of Fate in his own hand : from two vast jars he deals out good and evil to mankind. Where morals are concerned, he sanctions the oath (II., in. 227) both in this world and the next, and he is the friend of strangers and suppliants, the patron of the hospitable hearth. In Homer Zeus does not assume the form of the lower animals, and in the strange passage where he recounts his loves, the Leporello of his own Don Juan, he says nothing of those well-known disguises. In Hesiod the old wild tales revive, and we learn, for example (Theoy., 886 ; compare the scholiast), that Zeus swallowed his own wife, Metis, after inducing her to take the shape of a fly, just as Puss-in-Boots got rid of the ogre who turned himself into a mouse. In Hesiod, too, we have the tale of Prometheus and Pandora, a tale which afforded such an admirable theme for moral handling by ^Eschylus. Zeus tempted Epimetheus by the aid of the womav Pan dora ; hence came death into the world and all our woe. Then Prometheus pitied and aided men, whom Zeus had intended to destroy, and the hero was fixed to a rock in Caucasus by order of the god. The myth may be alle gorized in a dozen ways, and perhaps may be taken to mean that man does not increase happiness by increasing