Note 253.2 — Chapter XIII · Babylonian, Anatolian, and Aegean Ritual.

More direct evidence is to be gleaned from the cult of Sandon or Sandes of Tarsos, a city which was once within the area of Hittite culture. The god of Tarsos comes later to be identified with the Tyrian Baal and the Hellenic Herakles; and the legend of the death of the latter hero may be an echo of a ἱερὸς λόγος of Tarsos, inspired by an annual rite in which the god of the city was consumed on a funeral pyre, and was supposed to rise again from the flames in the form of an eagle.253.2 The later Tarsian coins display the image of the god, the pyre, the eagle, the double-headed axe, and the lion;253.3 and the last three of these symbols belong to the oldest religious art of the Hittites. The proof would be complete if it could be shown that the name Sandon or Sandes belongs to the Hittite language. All we know at present is that it is not a Babylonian or Sumerian word, or found in the vocabulary of any Semitic people. Prof. Sayce believes himself to have found it in a cuneiform inscription of Boghaz-Keui. This would be the direct proof that we require; but the word that he transliterates as Sandes is said to be the ideogram of Hadad, the Syrian Semitic god, and that Hadad is used as the Semitic equivalent of Sandes is merely a conjuncture.253.4