Note 52 — LECTURE II. The Origin and Contents of Primitive Religions.

The probable identity of Heb. Iah with Chald. Iah is acknowledged by Pinches, Sayce, and other eminent Assyriologists (see an article by the former, in the Proc. of the Victorian Institute for 1895). That the Greek Iachus is from the Chaldeo-Syrian (as his myth claims, referring to him as “The Assyrian stranger,” etc., L. Dyer The Gods in Greece, p. 165) was maintained by Herodotus, Macrobius, and Plutarch, among the ancients, and by various modern authors. It can be shown, however, that Yah as a name of God was derived from a sacred interjection or cry of the same phonetic value, which recurs repeatedly in the cults of America, Polynesia, and Australia. This is also true of hua or wa, the radical of the English “God.” They are both what have been called “universal” radicals.