_The winged globe._--This was a widely spread and highly venerated Egyptian symbol. From Egypt it spread, under various modifications, throughout the Old World. It is formed by a combination of the representations of the sun that have prevailed in different localities in Egypt, the mythology of which ended by becoming a solar drama. Two uræus snakes or asps, with heads erect, are twisted round a globe-shaped disk, behind which are the outstretched wings of a hawk, and on its top the horns of a goat. It commemorates the victory of the principle of light and good over that of darkness and evil. It spread readily among the Phenicians, where it is found suspended over the sacred tree and the sacred cone, and was carried wheresoever their art was introduced--westward to Carthage, Sicily, Sardinia, and Cyprus, eastward to Western Asia. Very early it penetrated on the north to the Hittites, and when it reached Mesopotamia, in the time of Sargonidæ, the winged circle assumed the shape of the wheel or rosette, surmounted by a scroll with upcurled extremities and with a feathered tail opening out like a fan, or a human figure in an attitude sometimes of benediction, sometimes warlike, was inscribed within the disk. Then it was no longer exclusively a solar emblem, but served to express the general idea of divinity. From Mesopotamia it passed to Persia, principally in the anthropoid type. It was, however, never adopted by Greece, and it is nowhere met with in Europe, except, as before stated, in the Mediterranean islands. When Greece took over from Asia symbolic combinations in which it was originally represented, she replaced it by the thunderbolt. But the aureole, or halo, which encircles the heads of her divinities, and which Christian art has borrowed from the classic, was directly derived from it.