urally the greater deity, and this not only well accounts for the connexion of Varuṇa with the waters, which, from the Atharvaveda onward, becomes his chief characteristic, but also accords with the attributes of a universal monarch. Nor is there anything in the name of the god to render this view doubtful. It seems to be derived from the root vṛ, "to cover," and to denote the covering sky, and many scholars have maintained that the name of the Greek deity Ouranos can be identified with it.
The antiquity of Mitra and Varuṇa has been carried back to about 1400 B.C., when their names occur on an inscription as gods of the Mitanni in northern Mesopotamia, but whether they were then Aryan or Iranian or Vedic gods is not clear.[1] It has been suggested, however, that the peculiar character of Varuṇa is due, like the character of Ahura Mazda, to borrowing, during the Indo-Iranian period, from a Semitic people, and that he and Mitra and the other Ādityas, seven in all corresponding to the Amesha Spentas of Iran,[2] were in origin the moon, the sun, and the five planets. Yet this view does not accord well with the physical side of Varuṇa in the Ṛgveda, in which his connexion with night is only slight; the Indians' knowledge of the five planets is very doubtful; and the Amesha Spentas seem purely abstract and Avestan deities. Nor is it necessary to see in Varuṇa's spies the stars, or in his bonds the fetters of night; both are the necessary paraphernalia of an Indian king, and, when thought of concretely, his fetter seems to be disease, in special perhaps dropsy.
Indra occurs in the same record of the Mitannian gods, and this shows that even then he must have been a great god. In the Ṛgveda there can be no comparison between Varuṇa and Indra in moral grandeur, but the latter is far more often mentioned and is clearly by all odds the more popular god. Indeed, in one hymn (iv. 42) the claims of the two divinities seem to be placed before us in their own mouths, Varuṇa as the creator and sustainer of the world, and Indra as the irresistible deity of battle; and the poet seems inclined to recognize the
- ↑ See H. Winckler, in Mitteilungen der deutschen Orientgesellschaft, No. 35 (1907); E. Meyer, "Das erste Auftreten der Arier in der Geschichte," in Sitzungsberichte der königlich-preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1908, pp. 14-19, and Geschichte des Altertums, I. ii. 651 ff. (3rd ed., Berlin, 1913); H. Jacobi, in JRAS 1909, pp. 721 ff., H. Oldenberg, ib. pp. 1095 ff., J. H. Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, London, 1913, pp. 6 ff.
- ↑ For the Amesha Spentas see infra, p. 260.
