The Phoenicians worshiped the moon and the stars. They adored the sun under the name of Hercules. The Ethiopians adored the sun and the moon; and Diodorus informs us, that those of their tribes who inhabited the country above Meroe adored the sun, the moon, and the universe. They called themselves the sons of the sun: Persina was the priestess of the moon, and the king, her husband, was the priest of the sun. All the Africans who were settled along the coast of Angola, and of Congo, worshiped the sun and the moon; so the inhabitants of the island of Teneriffe did. The oldest worship of the Arabs was Sabism, the religion universally spread in the Orient: the heaven and the stars were objects of veneration. The moon was more especially adored. The Saracens called her Cabar, which means great: even now-a-days her crescent adorns the religious monuments of the Turks. Among the Arabs each tribe was under the invocation or patronage of a star. The Sabism was also the religion of the ancient Chaldeans. Even now there is at Helle, on the ruins of Babylon, a mosque named Meshed Eschams, or Mosque of the Sun. In this city was the temple of Belus, or of the sun, the great deity of the Babylonians. To this same god the Persians reared temples and consecrated images, under the name of Mithra. They also honored the heaven under the name of Jupiter, the moon and Venus, the fire, the earth, the air or wind, and water. The fire ether that circulates in the whole universe, and of which the sun is the main force, was represented in the Pyrees by the sacred fire kept incessantly burning by the wizards, or priests. At Tymbree, in Troades, the sun was adored under the name of Apollo. The island of Rhodes was consecrated to the sun, to whom the colossal statue, known under the name of the Colossus of Rhodes, was erected. The Massagetes, the Abasges, the Derbises, the Tartars, the Moscanians, the Tchouvaches, the Toungouses, the Huns, all the Scytic nations, the Iberians, the Albanians, the Colchidians, the Phrygians, and the Laodiceans, worshiped the earth, the sun, the moon, and the stars, under various emblems. Plato informs us that the ancient Greeks had no other gods than the sun, the moon, the earth, the stars, water, and fire. Orpheus considered the sun as the greatest of the gods, and adored him upon mounts at his rise. Epicharmis, disciple of Pythagoras, called gods the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, water and fire. Agamemnon, in Homer, sacrificed to the sun and to the earth. The choir, in the Oedipus of Sophocles, invokes the sun as being the first among the gods, and their chief. The earth was worshiped in the island of Cos. Also the earth had a temple at Athens and at Sparta; and an altar and oracle at Olympia.