n (compare Fig. 26, _c_).

(l) An Assyrian Tree of Life and Winged Disk crudely conventionalized
(Ward, Fig. 695).

(m) Assyrian Tree of Life and "Winged Disk" in which the god is riding
in a crescent replacing the Disk (Ward, Fig. 695).]

This significance of gates was no doubt suggested by the idea that they
represented the means of communication between the living and the dead,
and, symbolically, the portal by which the dead acquired a rebirth into
a new form of existence. It was presumably for this reason that the
winged disk as a symbol of life-giving, was placed above the lintels of
these doors, not merely in Egypt, Phoenicia, the Mediterranean Area, and
Western Asia, but also in America,[345] and in modified forms in India,
Indonesia, Melanesia, Cambodia, China, and Japan.

The discussion (Chapter II) of the means by which the winged disk came
to acquire the power of life-giving, "the healing in its wings," will
have made it clear that the sun became accredited with these virtues
only when it assumed the place of the other "Eye of Re," the Great
Mother. In fact, it was a not uncommon practice in Egypt to represent
the eyes of Re or of Horus himself in place of the more usual winged
disk. In the AEgean area the original practice of representing the Great
Mother was retained long after it was superseded in Egypt by the use of
the winged disk (the sun-god).

Over the lintel of the famous "Lion Gate" at Mycenae, instead of the
winged disk, we find a vertical pillar to represent the Mother Goddess,
flanked by two lions which are nothing more than other representatives
of herself (Fig. 26). [Illustration: Fig. 26.

(a) An Egyptian picture of Hathor between the mountains of the horizon
(on which trees are growing) (after Budge, "Gods of the Egyptians," Vol.
II, p. 101). [This is a part only of a scene in which the goddess Nut is
giving birth to the sun, whose rays illuminate Hathor on the horizon, as
Sothis, the "Opener of the Way" for the sun.]

(b) The mountains of the horizon supporting a cow's head as a surrogate
of Hathor, from a stele found at Teima in Northern Arabia, now in the
Louvre (after Sir Arthur Evans, _op. cit._, p. 39). This indicates the
identity of what Evans calls "the horns of consecration" and the
"mountains of the horizon," and also suggests how confusion may have
arisen between the mountains and the cow's horns.

(c) The Mesopotamian sun-god Shamash rising between the Eastern
Mountains,