Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/80

 64 Roman Empire. Jupiter Dolichenus had one temple on the Aventine and another on the Esquiline in Rome in the time of the later Emperors. Moreover, inscriptions were dedicated to him in all the frontier provinces of the Empire,—in Dacia and Pannonia, in Germania and Britain. He was worshipped chiefly by soldiers, but also by merchants and other Syrian immigrants.

Very early the double axe was considered as a symbol, also, on the islands west of Asia Minor and in Greece. Of the Cretan labrys I have already spoken. Whenever it is possible to ascertain of what god it is the symbol, it is always found to be of the sun god.

An old relief has been discovered at Kameiros in Rhodes. Amongst its figures there is a man holding a double axe with a short handle in one hand, and a thunderbolt in the other (Fig. 6). The relief is damaged, so that the man's head and the top part of the thunderbolt cannot now be seen.

In Crete, and in other islands of the Ægaean Sea, double axes of bronze have been found, the votive character of which is obvious, as their blades are always too thin, and generally also too small, to have been of any real use.

During the excavations at Olympia a number of such votive double axes of thin bronze have been discovered in the deepest layers of the precinct dedicated to the sun god from time out of mind (Figs. 7 and 8).

Small double axes of thin gold date from a still earlier period, from the second millennium B.C. They have been found in the magnificent royal tombs of the Mycenæan acropolis. It is quite evident that they are votive axes, which is further confirmed by the fact that some of them are fixed between the horns of small bull's heads, made of thin gold (Fig. 9). A large bull's head, from one of the Mycenæan tombs, has between the horns on its forehead a big sun-like flower. We know that such flowers, chrysanthemums, have been in Western Asia, and are still in Japan, symbols of the sun.