Admitting, however, that Apollo overcame a mythical serpent, like many related divinities, from the Vedic sun-god, Indra, the destroyer of Ahis down, does not afford a satisfactory solution of the matter under discussion. The Agathodæmon is infinitely preferable to Typhon as the prototype of the serpent of Æsculapius. It, indeed, was the reptile sacred to Apollo as well as Tum. A study of the origin of the association of the good serpent with Apollo and Ra-Tum and other sun-gods is interesting. In the search for it one may get a clue to it in comparative mythology. The close resemblance to one another of Apollo, Ra, Baal-Samen of the Phœnicians, Shamas of the Assyrians, and other sun-gods, would lead one to think that there was an archetypal one; and to find this original one the intelligent mind would naturally look to the East, to the region about the lower waters of the Tigris and Euphrates, and with a reasonable expectation of discovering it there.[213] For among the Turanians, in that locality, the worship of the heavenly bodies undoubtedly first acquired prominence; and in the same locality, too, among the same people, the worship of serpents, according to Bryant,[214] who has written learnedly on the subject, began, and, as Fergusson says, not only originated but “spread thence, as from a centre, to every country or land of the old world in which a Turanian people settled,”[215] becoming adopted to some extent also by Semites and Aryans. From Hea, one of the three great gods (Ana, Hea, and Bel) of the Accadio-Sumerians, and, later, of the people of Babylonia, doubtless sprang some features of the Apollo myth, and possibly in part through Horus of the Egyptians. To Baal-Samen, the baal of the heavens, of the Phœnicians, Apollo had many points of resemblance. It has been maintained, however, that Apollo was “a pure growth of the Greek mind.”[216] He was so in part. [Illustration: FIG. 7.—A SYMBOL OF HEA.]