‘There was evening, there was morning—one day.’ A residuum of the old nomadic conception is found in the Egyptian myth that Thum, the form of the sun’s nocturnal existence, was born before Ra, the sun’s form by day. _Secondly_, chronology is thereby connected chiefly with the nocturnal heaven and the moon. It is to be observed on this subject that in nations which begin to count the day from the evening, the moon is the central figure and the starting point in the chronology of greater periods.[162] Seyffarth, in an essay entitled, ‘Did the Hebrews before the Destruction of Jerusalem reckon by lunar months?’ (published in 1848 in the _Zeitschrift der D.M.G._, II. 347 sqq.), endeavoured to defend the thesis that the Hebrew chronology was originally founded on solar months, which were not supplanted by lunar months till between the second and fourth century after Christ; but he supports this theory by arguments which cannot stand against profounder criticism. It must rather be assumed that the original lunar year at the beginning of agricultural life was united with the observation of the solar periods (see Knobel, _Commentary on Exodus_, p.95), so as to produce very early compensation of the difference between them; but that in the various attempts at compensation, which ended with the fixing of the calendar and the arrangement of the intercalary month, the reckoning by moons remained in the foreground, as is evident in the mode of compensation. In reference to the Arabs also, Sprenger has fully proved in the essay to which we have already referred in this chapter, that the solar element of chronology was subordinate, and that in the old times before Moḥammed the lunar reckoning was in force. As on another occasion we shall recur to the fact that among the Aryans the Indians retained a certain degree of nomadic sentiment more distinctly than any other Aryans, and that this is impressed on their literature and on many of their institutions, so here we may observe the same in reference to their chronology. In the Vedas, the oldest literature of the Sanskrit people, we find the lunar year of twelve months, with the occasional addition of a thirteenth or intercalary month.[163] It is remarkable that on this subject we find still more reminiscences of the nomadic life among the Persians. In the whole book of Avesta, in passages where the shining heavenly bodies are enumerated, they appear in this invariable order: Stars, Moon, and Sun, the sun always occupying the last place. And we even find also the reckoning of time by nights exactly as it is among the Arabs; which enables Spiegel to draw the just inference that the ancient Persians reckoned by lunar years.[164] According to Bunsen[165] the Delphic myth of the purification of Apollo likewise points to the conclusion that the Hellenes in later times substituted the solar for the old lunar chronology.