On the one side, the names of several of the constellations were the same among both Babylonians and Egyptians. Of this the Twins, Aquarius, or the Family, are examples, while it can hardly be an accident that Orion in both systems of astronomy is a giant and a hunter. “The Bull of heaven” was a Babylonian star, and Jupiter bore the Sumerian name of Gudi-bir, “the Bull of light”; in the Pyramid texts also we have a “Bull of heaven,” the planet Saturn according to Brugsch, Jupiter according to Lepsius. Still more striking are the thirty-six Egyptian decans, the stars who watched for ten days each over the 360 days of the ancient Egyptian year, and were divided into two classes or hemispheres, those of the day and those of the night.(191) Not only did the early Chaldæan year similarly consist of 360 days; it too was presided over by thirty-six “councillor” stars, half of which were above the earth, while the other half were below it.(192) Such a coincidence cannot have been accidental; the Babylonian and Egyptian decans must have had the same origin. But there was yet a further parallelism between the stellar theology of Egypt and that of Babylonia. In both countries the worship of the stars passed into an astro-theology. The official gods were identified with the planets and fixed stars, and the stellar cult of the people was thus absorbed into the State religion. But whereas this astro-theology was characteristic of Babylonia, it has done little more than leave its traces on the historical religion of Egypt. Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars were identified with Horus under different forms, and Mercury with Set, while Venus became “the bark (_za_)(193) of the phœnix” or soul “of Osiris.” Sirius was made the star of Isis, Orion the star of Osiris. But, like the cult of the stars itself, this astro-theology belongs to a far-off age in Egyptian history. It is the last faint reflection of a phase of religious thought which had passed away when the monumental records first begin. It is the same with a curious echo of ancient Babylonian cosmology, to which Prof. Hommel has drawn our attention. The old Babylonian Epic of the Creation begins with the words— “At that time the heaven above was not known by name, the earth beneath was not named, in the beginning the deep was their generator, the chaos of the sea was the mother of them all.”