Max Mueller,[1507] which derived all Aryan
(Indo-European) myths from phenomena of the sun and the dawn, largely,
he held, through misunderstandings of the meaning of old descriptive
terms (myths as a "disease of language"). It is conceivable that a word,
originally used simply as descriptive of an actual fact, may have passed
into a proper name and become personalized and the center of adventures;
but the character of early man's thought, as we now know it, makes it
impossible to regard such a view as a probable explanation of the mass
of mythological material. Mueller's services to the science of the
history of religions were great, but his theory of the origin of myths
has now been generally abandoned.[1508]

+866+. The great discoveries of literary material made in Egypt and
Babylonia since the middle of the nineteenth century have aroused
special interest in the religions of these countries. Leadership in
ancient civilization is claimed by Egyptologists and Assyriologists,
each party for its own land. It is, however, Babylonia that has given
rise to the largest theories of the unity of myths--a fact due in part
to its development of astronomy, in part, perhaps, to the resemblance
between the Babylonian mythical material and that of the Old Testament.
Dupuis[1509] had observed that the ancient Chaldeans taught that the
heavenly bodies controlled mundane destinies, and, according to
Diodorus, that the planets were the interpreters of the will of the
gods. This is substantially the point of view of E. Stucken,[1510] who,
in common with Dupuis (though, apparently, independently), holds to the
unity of ancient religions and the astral origin of all myths. From
Babylonia, he thinks, myths passed to all parts of the world, Egypt,
Asia, Europe, Polynesia, and America--in such migrations, however, it
was the motif that passed; the personages might vary in different
lands.[1511] Finally he traces all sagas of all peoples to the creation
myth.[1512] This supreme unification is reached by arguments so
far-fetched as to deprive them of force.

Stucken's position was adopted and elaborated by H. Winckler, who was
followed by A. Jeremias and some others.[1513] Winckler attempts to show
that a single religion existed in the ancient Oriental world (with a
single system of myths), and that this was dominated by the conception
that there was a correspondence between the heavenly world and the lower
world in such wise that all earth