beck, and water, are synonymous; and yet we find a stream in the north of England called Wans-beck-water. The words nagara and pura in Sanscrit both signify "city;" but we find in India a city called Nag-poor. In the same way, we believe that both parts of the word Is-ter denote "water" or "river." The first part of the word is contained in the name of our own river Thames, or Tam-isis, the upper part of which is still called the Is-is the second part we shall discuss directly, in speaking of the third Scythian river. The other and more recent name, Dan-ub-ius, also contains two elements, each signifying "water" or "river." The latter part is found in the Gaelic ap, and in our Avon, &c.; the former in most of the Scythian rivers, as will presently appear.

The next river is the Por-ata or Pruth, which obviously contains the same root as the Greek word wópos and the Scythian paris.

The third river is called by Herodotus the Túp-ns, and is now known as the Dnies-ter or Danas-ter. The latter part of this name is the same as the latter part of Is-ter. The first part of the compound is the commencement of the other name of the Is-ter. In the transcription of Herodotus, either this word is omitted, and the Danas-ter is mentioned merely as the Ter, or the last syllable of Túp-ys represents the first syllable of the Is-ter; so that the Danube was called the Is-ter, and the Dniester the Ter-is. It is singular that the syllables Dan-, Don-, or Dun-, and Ter- or Tur-, are used in the Celtic and Pelasgian languages respectively to signify "height," or "hill,” or “hilltower;" and it is to be supposed that this was the origin of their application to the river, which flows rapidly down from its birthplace in the mountains1.

The river Hypan-is is called, according to the Greek transcription, by a name compounded of the Celtic Apan (Avon) and the word is-, which we have just examined. The first part of the word occurs also in the name of the river Hypa-caris, which means the water of Caris. The root of the second part of this name appears in the names of the city Car-cine, and the river Ger-rus, which flowed into the Car-cinitis sinus by the same

1 Coleridge has, with much poetical truth, designated a cataract as "the son of the rock" (Poems, Vol. II. p. 131).

mouth as the Hypan-is and Hypa-caris. It would also seem that the exceedingly corrupted name Pan-ticapes began originally with the same word: the meaning of the last three syllables is absolutely lost, and they will scarcely be sought in the modern name Ingul-etz, of which we can only say that the last syllable represents the root is-; comp. Tana-is, Tana-etz1.

The Greeks who dwelt near the mouth of the great river Borysthenes naturally pronounced the native name of the river in the manner most convenient to their own articulation; and the name, as it stands, is to all outward appearance a Greek word. This circumstance has deceived the ablest of modern geographers, who derives the first part of the word from Bopis or Bopeas. There is little difficulty, however, in showing that the name is identical with that by which the river is known at the present time, the Dnie-per or Dana-paris, with the last part of which we may compare the name Porata or Pruth. It is well known that the northern Greeks were in the habit of substituting the medial, not only for the tenuis, but even for the aspirate; thus we have βύργος for πύργος, Βερενίκη for Φερενίκη, δανεῖν for θανεῖν, and Βόσπορος for Φώσφορος. Accordingly, their pronunciation of the word Dana-paris (=Paris-danas) would be Dana-baris, or, by an interchange of the two synonymous elements, Baris-danas 2. But the Greek ear was so familiar with the sequence o0-, that the sd- would inevitably fall into this collocation; and, with a change of vowels, for the same purpose of giving the barbarous name a Greek sound, the compound would become the Hellenic form Bopvo@évns, a word which has hitherto eluded etymological analysis.

The Tana-is was the most easterly of Scythian, and indeed of European rivers. The explanation of the name is implied in what has been already stated. No difficulty can arise from the appearance of a tenuis instead of the medial, which generally

1 The identification of the Ingul-etz with the Pan-ticapes depends upon the position of the Hylæa, or "woodland" district, which must have been on the right bank of the Borysthenes, for the other side of the river is both woodless and waterless (see Lindner Skythien, Stuttgart, 1841, p. 40, sqq.). The name Ingul is borne by another river, which may be identified with the Hypa-caris.

2 A similar change has taken place in the name Berezina.

appears in the first part of this name; for the Danube, which is most consistently spelt with the medial, is called the Tun-owe in the Niebelungen-lied (v. 6116). The Tanais seems to have been the same river which the Cossacks still call the Donaetz or Tanaetz.

We find the word Dana-s in composition not only with the synonyms Is-, Ap-, Paris, and Ter, but also with Rha-, which occurs in the names of the Asiatic A-ra-xes, and in that of the Rha-, or Wolga. Thus, we have the E-ri-danus in Italy, the Rha-danau in Prussia, the Rho-danus in France, and the name 'Poù-dov, quoted by Ptolemy. In England the name Dana occurs by itself as "the Don."

§ 11.

Names of the Scythian divinities.

Let us now pass to the names of the Scythian gods, which may be referred without any difficulty to the roots of the IndoGermanic family of languages. Herodotus informs us (iv. 59), that the names by which the Scythians designated the Greek divinities, Ιστίη, Ζεύς, Γῆ, Ἀπόλλων, Ουρανίη Αφροδίτη, and Ποσειδέων, were Ταβιτί, Παπαῖος, Ἀπία, Οἰτόσυρος, Αρτίμπаσα, and Оaμuaoádus; and it is clear, from his manner of speaking of these and the Medo-Persian divinities (I. 131), that he is describing one and the same elementary worship.

'IoTin, or Vesta, was the goddess of fire, as Ovid tells us (Fast. VI. 291): "nec tu aliud Vestam quam vivam intellige flammam." There can be no doubt why the Medo-Scythians called her Tabiti, when we know that in the Zend and Sanscrit languages the root tab- or tap- signifies "to burn." Compare also the Latin tab-eo, tepidus, the Greek Tip-os, the German thau-en, the new Persian tebiden, Sclavonian teplye, whence Toeplitz, "the hot baths," and the river Tepel at Karlsbad, the Oscan teforom (Tab. Agnon. vv. 17, 20), Etrusc. tephral (Orelli, 1384), &c. The same root may also appear in the Persian local names cited by Zeuss (die Deutschen, p. 286), namely Ταβιήνη between Caramania and Parthia, Ταβιάνα an island on the coast of Persia, Τάπη a city in Hyrcania, Ταπουροί or Тажоúрeоι, people in Media and on the Imaus.

Ζεύς, οι Ζεὺς πατήρ (Jupiter), was called Παπαῖος οι "the Father," a name by which he was known to the Latins also. The primary labial sounds are appropriated in all languages to express the primary relation of parent and child. The

children on whom Psammitichus tried his experiment (Herod. II. 2) first uttered the articulate sound Be-kós, apparently the first labial followed by the first guttural; and in some articulations, as well as in the order of our alphabet, this is the natural sequence. To this spontaneous utterance of the first labials to designate the parental relation and the primary necessities of infancy, I have referred elsewhere (N. Crat. § 262); and it seems to have struck Delitsch also (Isagoge, p. 131), when he speaks of those nouns "quæ aboriginum instar sine verbi semine sponte provenerunt, velut 1, DN, primi labiales balbutientis pueri, Sanscr. pi-tri, ma-tri, &c." The word wanatos shows us very clearly the connexion between the Persian and Sarmatian languages; for while in the Pehlevi, as Richardson tells us, (s. v. báb) "the name bábâ or báb is given by way of excellence to express fire, which they worship as the father and principle of all things," we find Babai in Jornandes (cc. 54, 55) as the name of a Sarmatian king. According to Xenophon (Cyrop. VIII. 8, § 24) the Persians distinguished between Jupiter and the Sun, and he also speaks of separate sacrifices to Vesta and Jupiter (Cyrop. I. 6, § 1, VII. 5, § 57). But he may very well have confused between the different ingredients in this worship of fire.

The Scythian name for the goddess of the Earth is 'Amía. This word actually occurs in Greek, as the name of the country where the Pelasgians ruled: and the root Ap- or Op- is of frequent occurrence both in Greece and in Italy (Buttmann's Lexil. s. v., and above, Ch. I. § 3).

As the Scythian religion appears to have exhibited an elementary character, we should expect that their Apollo would be "the god of the sun." And this seems to be the meaning of his name, as cited by Herodotus. Οιτό-συρος should signify "the light or life of the sun." The second part of the word at once refers us to the Sanscrit sûrya, which is also implied in the σúpiov apua of Eschylus (Pers. 86. N. Crat. § 473). The first two syllables may be explained as follows. After the loss

=

of the digamma, the sound of w at the beginning of a word was often expressed by o: thus we have "Oatos Faços; "Oaσis, with its modern equivalent el Wah; the Persian interjection oa (Eschyl. Pers. 116), which is doubtless the Greek representative of the oriental exclamation wah; the N. Test. ovai weh ; and the word oorpos, referring to the whizzing noise of the

=

TE

gad-fly. Accordingly, Oiró-σupos, pronounced Wito-suros, signifies the Uita, Oiтos, Aioa, or life of the sun: comp. the Russian Vite, signifying "a portion;" or if we prefer the cognate idea of light, we may compare the oito- with aion, allós, uitta, weiss, "white," Egypt. wit, Copt. oeit, "to be white or brilliant," &c. As the oúpiov apua seems to show that the Persian sun-god was sometimes known by a part of this Scythian name, we might be led to ask whether the Persian Mithras had not a representative in Scythia. Now we read not only that the Persians called the "Sun" Mithras (Strabo, p. 752: τιμῶσι δὲ τὸν Ἥλιον, ὃν καλοῦσι Μίθραν), but also that the Persians gave the name of Mitra to the heavenly Venus (Herod. I. 131: ἐπιμεμαθήκασι δὲ καὶ τῇ Οὐρανίῃ θύειν, παρά Ασσυρίων μαθόντες καὶ ̓Αραβίων. καλέουσι δὲ Ἀσσύριοι τὴν Αφροδίτην Μύλιττα, Αράβιοι δὲ Ἄλιττα, Πέρσαι δὲ Μίτραν). From this it appears that the Persians had a pair of deities called Mithras and Mithra, and that the latter corresponded to the heavenly Venus. But the very dualism itself shows that she must have been a form of Artemis, the sister-goddess of Apollo, and therefore represented the moon. Thus Jul. Firmicus says (de Err. Prof. Relig. I. c. 5): “hi itaque [Magi et Persæ] Jovem in duas dividunt potestates, naturam ejus ad utriusque sexus transferentes, et viri et feminæ simulacra ignis substantiam deputantes." This pair of deities seems to be implied in the dual forms ahuraêibya mithraibya in the Yaçna, which Burnouf translates (p. 351): "les deux seigneurs Mithras." But the most important authority for the present purpose is the inscription quoted by Zeuss (p. 289), from Gudii Inscr. Antiquæ, p. 56, 2, which should be read: ΘΕΑΙ . ΣΕΛΗΝΗΙ . ΟΙΤΟΣΚΥΡΑΙ . ΚΑΙ. ΑΠΟΛΛΩΝΙ . ΟΙΤΟΣΚΥΡΩΙ . ΜΙΘΡΑΙ . Μ . ΟΥΛΠΙΟΣ. ΠΛΟΚΑΜΟΣ . ΝΕΩΚΟΡΟΣ. ΑΝΕΘ. This shows that the epithet of the "sun" quoted as Scythian by Herodotus (with the mere change of σk for σ to represent the sound sh: see Maskil le-Sopher, p. 8) is applicable to the moon as well as to the sun, and that Apollo-Oitosyrus was also Mithras. Now we know that "ApTeuis was specially worshipped by the Persians; for Plutarch says (Vit. Lucull. c. 24): Περσία Αρτεμις ἣν μάλιστα θεῶν οἱ πέραν Εὐφράτου βάρβαροι τιμῶσι, and her Persian name Zapnτis (Hesych.) was probably connected with Sûrya; but if she was, as this investigation has shown, also identical with