Note 3 — Chapter VI · THE FINDS AT THE GREAT ZIMBABWE RUINS

Of the maternal aspect in which the ancient Egyptians held the vulture we have ample evidence. Horapollo tells us (I. 11) that the vulture was emblematic of ‘Urania, a year, a mother,’ whilst Ælian goes so far as to suppose that all vultures were females, to account for their character as emblems of maternity. The cesti and the circles point obviously to this, and these birds in connection with phallic worship are interesting as emblems, signifying incubation. Let us now consult Lucian, who in his work ‘De Syriâ Deâ’ describes a temple at Hierapolis, near the Euphrates, which, as we have seen, has much in common with these temples at Zimbabwe. In § 33, p. 479, he mentions a curious pediment, of no distinctive shape, called by the Assyrians ‘the symbol,’ on the top of which is perched a bird. Amongst some of Dr. Schliemann’s discoveries at Mycene, there are also images surmounted by birds which differ from the ξόανον in the ‘De Syriâ Deâ’ solely in the fact that they are not shapeless, but represent a nude female figure. The goddess of this shrine was evidently Astarte, and wore a cestus, ‘with which none but Urania is adorned.’3 On a Phœnician coin found in Cyprus we have the dove on the betyle or pedestal as the central object.4 In Egyptian archæology we also come across the bird on the pedestal, more particularly in the curious zodiac of Denderah, where a bird perched on a pillar, and with the crown of Upper Egypt on its head, is, as Mr. Norman Lockyer tells me, used to indicate the commencement of the year; also from the Soudan we have a bird on a pedestal carved on some rude stone fragments now in the Ashmolean Museum. It is just possible that the birds at Zimbabwe had some solstitial meaning, but as their exact position on the temple walls is lost, it is impossible to speak on this point with anything like certainty. Also in the difficult question of early Arabian cult, which was closely bound up with that of Egypt, Assyria, and Phœnicia, we find the vulture as the totem of a Southern Arabian tribe at the time of the Himyaritic supremacy, and it was worshipped there as the god Nasr, and is mysteriously alluded to in Himyaritic inscriptions as ‘the vulture of the East and the vulture of the West,’ which also would seem to point to a solstitial use of the emblem.5