tribe, a family, just like the Levites among the Hebrews;[188] and in ancient times many sacerdotal functions, ‘the smaller and less important religious duties, were assigned to the heads of the various subdivisions of the tribe.’ The name of the priests, môbed (which Spiegel explains as umâna-païti = ‘chief head of the tribe or family,’ perhaps equivalent to the Hebrew rôsh bêth âbh), in itself indicates the original universality of the bestowal of the sacerdotal functions on the head of the tribe.[189] As in Iran a fundamental social institution, so among the Sanskrit people a prominent mythological fact is the notable residuum of nomadism: viz. the fact that by them the first seat and highest rank among the figures of the myth and subsequently among the gods is assigned not to Dyu, but to Varuṇa and Indra. It is not to the field-guarding, harvest-sending, shining sunny heaven, but to Varuṇa the coverer and Indra the rain-sender, that the nomad directs his admiration and sympathy, his veneration and devotion. This relation towards Indra was preserved by the Indian from the nomadic period—from a time before that remarkable people had chosen a permanent abode on the banks of the Ganges and Indus. With this agrees very well the idea which Roth worked out in an essay on ‘the highest gods of the Aryan peoples,’ that Varuṇa is as old as the Aryan period, and is the common property of all members of the race; even the conception of Indra being later than that of Varuṇa, and specially Indian.[190] But it is not only among the Indians that we find this memory of nomadic life impressed on the mythology; its traces may be found also in the Hellenic mythology, not however as a positive, actual existence, as in India, but still as an historical reminiscence. According to Hesiod’s _Theogony_, the dominion of Zeus was preceded by that of Uranus; i.e. before the Hellenic people, choosing a settled agricultural life, brought Zeus, the bright sunny heaven, into the foreground, the centre of their world was Uranus (Varuṇa), the gloomy overclouded sky. There is scarcely any serious reason for regarding, as Bunsen[191] and some writers on the history of religion do, the kingdom of Zeus alone as an original intellectual product of the Hellenic people, and putting aside Uranus as merely a result of Theogonic speculation, or for even seeing in Uranus a figure borrowed from a Semitic source. The succession—Uranus, Zeus—rather corresponds perfectly with the successive stages of civilisation, nomadism and agriculture, and all that Hesiod did was to clothe an historical, natural and true tradition of the Hellenic people in the form of a theogonic story. With this, other points of the Theogony seem to be clearly and unmistakably connected, namely those in which we perceive the idea of the priority of the Night. Among the powers preceding the rule of Zeus in Hesiod’s _Theogony_, _Chaos_ is named—a word signifying according to its original sense ‘darkness’—and _Tartarus_.