Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/584

552 BOOK which has given birth to Ahi, Vritra, the Panis, and the kindred beings of Greek mythology; but it can scarcely be said that either the name or the figures of the Hellenic Sphinx have been borrowed from Egypt.^ The Egj-ptian Sphinx is very seldom winged, and is never represented except as prone and recumbent, or in any form except that of a lion with a human head and bust. The notion that the riddling Sphinx of Thebes was derived from the land of the Nile may have originated with Herodotos, or may have been taken for granted on the bare assertion of Egyptian priests by others before himself; but the name existed in Greek mythology long before the port of Naukratis was opened to Greek commerce. The conclusions which Herodotos drew from his Egj-ptian informants on the subjects of ethnology and mythology were in almost every case ^^Tong ; and the Sphinx is too closely connected with Echidna and Zohak, with Orthros, Vritra, Geryon, and Cacus, to justify any classification which professes to account for one without explaining the rest.^

The Riddle In point of fact, few Greek myths are more transparent than that solved. Q^ ^YiQ monster which is slain by Oidipous. The story which made her the daughter of Orthros or Typhon, said simply that the cloud in which the thunder abode, and in which the rain was imprisoned, was the child of the darkness : the version which made her a daughter of Laios ^ spoke of her as sprung from the great enemy of Indra and Phoibos — the darkness under another name. The huge storm-cloud moves slowly through the air : and so the phrase went that Here the goddess of the open heaven had sent the Sphinx, because the Thebans had not punished her enemy Laios, who had carried off Chr}-sippos from Pisa. Others related that she had been sent by Ares, the grinder, to avenge herself on Kadmos for slaying his child the dragon, or that she was come to do the bidding of Dionysos or of Hades. The effect of her coming is precisely that which follows the theft of the cows of Indra by the Panis. The blue heaven is veiled from sight, the light of the sun is blotted out, and over the city broods the mighty mass, beetling like a gigantic rock, which can never be moved until some one comes with strength enough to conquer and to slay her. The robber)- and rescuing of the cows are the only incidents which have fallen out of the Theban

' BrowTi, Great Dionysiak Myth, i. case to the top of a palm-tree, from the 400, branches of w hich it struck down abun-

Wilson, 514) the sphinx appears as the upon earth by the wind." The simile demon Dheanka, whom " Kama seized here gives the original form of the myth, by both hind legs, and whirling him ^ I'aus. ix. 26, 2. round until he expired, tossed his car-
 * In the Vishnu Purana (H. H. dance of fruit, like raindrops poured