Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/120

 84 Outlines of European History Origin of names of the planets The oriental renaissance the heavenly bodies (see p. 68). The art was now very syste- matically pursued and was really becoming astronomy.- The equator was divided into 360 ,degrees, and for the first time they laid out and mapped the twelve groups of stars which we call the " Twelve Signs of the Zodiac." Thus for the first time the sky and its worlds were mapped out into a system. The five planets then known (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) were especially regarded as the powers controlling the fortunes of men, and as such the five leading Babylonian divinities were identified with these five heavenly bodies. It is the names of these Babylonian divinities which, in Roman translation, have de- scended to us as the names of these five planets. So the planet of Ishtar, the goddess of love, became Venus, while that of the great god Marduk became Jupiter, and so on. The celestial observations made by these Chaldean "astrologers," as we call them, slowly be- came sufficiently accurate, so that when inherited by the Greeks they formed the basis of the science of astronomy, which the Greeks carried so much further (p. 162). The practice of " astrol- ogy " has survived to our own day; we still unconsciously recaH it in such phrases as " his lucky star " or an " ill-starred undertaking." This Chaldean age is in many respects an effort to restore the civilization of the earlier Babylonia of Hammurapi's day (pp. 67-69). The scribes now love to employ an ancient style of writ- ing and out-of-date forms of speech ; the kings tunnel deep under the temple foundations and search for years that they may find the old foundation records buried (like our corner-stone docu- ments) by kings of ancient days. Likewise in Egypt and among the Hebrews, as well as in Babylonia, the men of the East are deeply conscious of the distant past through which their ancestors have come down through the ages. The oriental world is grow- ing old, and men are looking back upon her far-away youth with wistful endeavors to restore it to the earth again. Indeed, the leadership of the Semitic peoples in the early world is drawing near its close, and they are about to give way before the ad- vance of the Indo-Euiropean race, to which we must now turn.