Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/151

 The Prehistoric Gods I3 5

“Good Kingdom”; Spenta Armaiti, “ Holy Harm mony”; Haurvatat, “Soundness,” “Health”; and Amcretat, “Immortality.” It is a beautiful, heavenly hierarchy, but it is unmythological, non-naturalistic to the bone. If anywhere, then here is the place where sprang up purely symbolic gods in the man- ner of the symbolic creations in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

As for the Shemitic source of this deiﬁed solar system, Professor Oldenberg, if I understand him aright, is in part led thereto by the striking ethical

character which is manifested by the gods of this

group at so early a period of Indo—Eumpean history as is the common period of Persia and India. He thinks that the Shemites preceded the laden-Euro.- peans in the evolution of ethical concepts, and that the ethical coloring of the Ahura~Varuna myth came along with the divinities themselves. But, as I have shown, we ﬁnd the chief Aryan ethical concept, the rm, safely imbedded in the Persian dynastic Arta~names that are reported in the Cunei~ form Tel-el—Amarna tablets, 1600 years B.C. Now that date lies far back of the period from which Pro- fessor Oldenberg would deduce his results. I should prefer to judge that the wide prevalence of this idea at a very early date shows rather that some, if not all, IndouEuropeans had advanced in ethical