result, we may, I think, take it for granted that the Chinese followed the _star mark_ and not the _season_ appointed for the beginning of the year by Tchuen-Hio. And thus following the star mark, the beginning of their year imperceptibly receded from the solstice, and approached the spring equinox, so that in 1600 A.D. the Jesuit fathers found the year still beginning at the new moon, “vers le Siou Hiu,” _and hence at the season midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox._ [106] Legge, _Chinese Classics_, vol. i., _Confucian Analects_, book xv., ch. x. In a former Paper contributed to these _Proceedings_,[107] I suggested that in the inscription engraved on Gudea’s diorite statue we had evidence of a reform of the already existing Accadian calendar--in use from a date much earlier than Gudea’s in the neighbouring Babylonian kingdom. [107] February 1896, V. p. 54. Gudea’s date is placed by scholars at about 2800 B.C.--not much earlier than at that claimed in the Chinese History for Tchuen-Hio. Much honour is given by this priestly ruler of Lagash “to Ningirsu, and to the goddess Bau, his beloved consort,” and the concluding lines of the inscription run as follows:-- “On the day of the beginning of the year, the day of the festival of Bau, on which offerings were made: one calf, one fat sheep, three lambs, six full grown sheep, two rams, seven _pat_ of dates, seven _sab_ of cream, seven palm buds. “Such were the offerings made to the goddess Bau, in the ancient temple on that day.” The generally received opinion as to Ningirsu (Ninib) is, that he was the god of the “southern sun”; and, as I contended in my Paper, the _southern sun_, if we think of the sun in its _yearly_, not merely in its daily course, may fitly represent the sun of the winter solstice, while the goddess Bau = Gula is the goddess by whose very name the constellation Aquarius, as we may assume, was designated in the Accadian astrological texts. If from Gudea’s inscription concerning the new year’s festival a reform in the calendar of Lagash may be inferred, by which the beginning of the year was transferred from the stars of Aries to those of Aquarius, we should find that the Lagash inscription, and the great History of China, tell us the same story--the Lagash inscription supplementing the Chinese History in this important point--that whereas the account of Tchuen-Hio’s reform has been manifestly more or less garbled in its long descent through human hands: that of Gudea’s new year’s festival is a contemporaneous and utterly untampered-with account. It is also of some moment to note one curious point of resemblance in the idea connected with the stars of Aquarius, by the astronomers of countries so far distant from each other as China and Mesopotamia. Hiu, as we have learnt, may be translated as “Vacuum,” and the name of the goddess Bau or Bahu bears the same signification as the Hebrew word translated in Genesis i. 2 by “void.”[108]