amash_, ruling over all kingdoms. Who issues
decrees, the goddess of the universe.... _Besides thee there is no
guiding deity_...."

99 As an illustration of the ideas connected with Astarte it is
interesting to note that fish and doves, inhabitants of the sea and
air, became her sacred emblems. The horns which she is sometimes
represented as wearing seem to be not only symbolical of the moon,
but also to be a remnant of a more ancient form of symbolism which
associated the goddess with the cow. It is stated that, in Canaan,
Astarte was represented under the form of a cow and it will be shown
that, in the Egyptian zodiac Polaris and Ursa Major were represented
under the form of a bull or cow or its thigh. The eye painted on the
prow of the ship was also a symbol of the goddess, an interesting
fact considering that the eye expresses a star among other primitive
people.

100 Book V, Chaps. VIII-X.

101 "That the Hebrew and Babylonian traditions [of the Creation] spring
from a common source is so evident as to require no further proof.
The agreements are too close to be accidental. At the same time the
variations in detail point to an independent elaboration of the
traditions on the part of the Hebrews and Babylonians.... It is in
Babylonia that the thought would naturally arise of making the world
begin with the close of the storms and rains in the spring. The
Terahites must, therefore, have brought those cosmological
traditions with them upon migrating from the Euphrates Valley to the
Jordan district.... The intercourse, political and commercial,
between Palestine and Mesopotamia was uninterrupted.... The
so-called Babylonian exile brought Hebrews and Babylonians once more
side by side.... A direct borrowing [of traditions] from the
Babylonians has not taken place and while the Babylonian records are
in all probability much older than the Hebrew, the latter again
contain elements, as Gunkel has shown, of a more primitive character
than the Babylonian production. This relationship can only
satisfactorily be explained on the assumption that the Hebrews
possessed the traditions upon which Genesis narrative rests, long
before the Babylonian exile, when the story appears, indeed, to have
received its final and present shap