To help in solving this difficulty, recourse may again wisely be had to Babylonian astronomic lore. The fanciful legends regarding the Aswins, considered only by themselves, can scarcely yield a sufficiently firm foundation on which to build the far-reaching theory I now desire to bring forward concerning them; a theory on all fours with one I ventured some years ago to propound in reference to Babylonian astronomy, in a Paper entitled the “Accadian Calendar.”[79] It was there suggested that the probable date for the origin of that Calendar was about 6,000 B.C. The fact was pointed out that Aries, in the most ancient Accadian and Babylonian astronomical works, always appears as leader of the signs and of the year, and stress was laid on the unlikelihood that this constellation should have been chosen for this leading post at a date when the sun’s entry into it did not correspond with any one of the four well-marked natural divisions of the year, _i.e._ the solstices or equinoxes. But as on the cuneiform tablets Aries appears as _leader_ long before the time when the sun sojourned in that constellation during the first month following _the equinox_, it was suggested that it was when the _solstitial not the equinoctial_ point coincided with the first degree of Aries, that the Accadian calendrical scheme had first been drawn up; namely about 6,000 B.C. [79] _Proceedings of Society of Biblical Archæology_, January 1892. A corroboration of the view then put forward is to be drawn from a further study of the Accadian month names. The first three month names, in Accadian, referred, as scholars have pointed out, to the first three constellations of the Zodiac. (1.) The month of the “sacrifice of righteousness” to Aries. (2.) The month of the “propitious Bull” to Taurus. (3.) The month of “the Twins” to Gemini. The twelfth and thirteenth names in the same series seem to refer equally clearly to a year originally counted as beginning at the _winter solstice_. They are called respectively: “12th. The month of sowing of seed.”--“13th. The dark month of sowing.” For the sowing of most cereals, late autumn and early winter are the favoured seasons. Many crops however are sown in early spring. There might then be a doubt whether “the month of sowing of seed” more fitly described the spring sowing of seed in the twelfth month of a luni-solar year, counted from the _equinox_,--or the winter sowing of seed in the twelfth month of a luni-solar year, counted from the _solstice_. But when we find this twelfth month followed by a thirteenth, of which the especial and added epithet is _dark_, there can, as it seems to me, be little if any doubt that the winter month whose range in different years extended from 12th of December to 22nd January is better described by the epithet dark, than the rapidly brightening month whose range extended from 12th March to 22nd April.