MARK OF HONOR


births are hidden,whose forms are manifold,
and whose growth cannot be known." It
was from him, in his very likeness, that men
were deified, as witness the words of the god
Amen-Ra, in a song of deification addressed
to Tahutmes III (B. C. 1503-1449), in-
scribed on the walls of the great temple at
Karnak:

I made them regard thy Holiness as the blazing
     sun;
Thou shinest in sight of them in my form.

  Much the same thought is expressed by
Virgil in the Aeneid (XII. 163) when he
says: King Latinus, of majestic frame,
is carried in a chariot drawn by four
steeds; twelve golden beams circle his daz-
zling brows, the ensign of the Sun, his
grandsire.
  In Mesopotamian art, possibly Egyptian
in its origin, the sun held an important
place, and there are some remains that


irt toward its use as
mark of distinction,
t never as a head or-
ment, not even like
e sun-disc that crowns
e  Egyptian   deities,
mmon-Ra, Isis, Hathor,
.d others, but it hovers
ove the head of the
haldaean and Assyrian
ids and men under the
rm of a winged sun-
sc, or a half-length
   figure of a man
   within  a  winged


   Ammon-Ra, 1830 B. C. circle, and some-
times under the form of a circle of rays
placed behind the personage represented.
  In Iranian art an almost similar condi-


tion is found. The religion of Iran, as
embodied in the Avesta, with its two oppos-
ing and irreconcilable principles: Ahura-
mazda, the god of light, and Angro-main-


Coin of Trajan, 98 A. D.


yus, the god of darkness, did not permit of
a very great amount of material expression.
"Nevertheless," as Perrot and Chipiez re-
mark, "here, as in the rest of the world, the
mind of man needed a tangible form that
should stand for and reflect the image of
the deity." According to Iranian belief,
the whole circle of the heavens was the
Creator, his body was the light, his gar-
ment was the firmament, and when he,
Ahura-mazda, gave himself a personality,
making himself known to mortal eyes, he
took a human form, which in art was por-
trayed by the figure of a man rising out of
a winged solar disc or halo, a form evidently
borrowed, with slight modification, from the
plastic art of Babylonia and Nineveh. And
in the administration of the Universe this
omniscient force, Ahura-mazda, employed
a number of energies to preside over and
guide the forces of Nature and the life of
man, and these manifestations of his om-
nipotent power were represented in art by
personifications, both masculine and femi-
nine, and were usually crowned with a halo,
as for example, the youth Mithra: the god
                                       19