Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/518

486 BOOK may therefore well be doubted whether the name Aig}'ptos itself be not a word which may in its earlier form have shown its affinity with Aigai, Aigaion, Aigialos, Aigaia, and other names denoting simply the breaking or dashing of water against the shores of the sea or the banks of a river.^

The LjT- But one of the Dan aides refused or failed to slay her husband. keios. ^j^^ name of this son of Aigyptos is Lynkeus, a ni} th to which Pausanias furnishes a clue by giving its other form Lyrkeios. But Lyrkeios was the name given to the river Inachos in the earlier portion of its course, and thus this stor}- would simply mean that although the other streams were quite dried up, the waters of the Lpkeios did not wholly fail.^

' Preller thinks that when the idea had still to struggle with the Hydra, of a forei"-n origin for Aig)-ptos and His victory was not achieved until he Danaos w^ once suggested, the Nile had severed this neck which Hyper- with its yearly inundations and shrink- mnestra refused to touch. The heads ings presented an obvious point of com- of the slain sons of Ai_g>-ptos are the palison with the Cheimarrhoi or winter- heads which Herakles hewed off from torrents of the Peloponnesos. — Gr. the Hydra's neck : and thus this labour Myth. ii. 47. of Herakles resolves itself into the

the one stream which is not dried up, the earth, the conquest of which is of answers to the neck of the Lernaian course the setting in of thorough Hydra. So long as streams were sup- drought, plied from the main source, Heiakles
 * The head of Lynkeus (Lpkeios), struggle of the sun with the streams of