Forlong - Rivers of Life

356
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
as well as god; and Rat, Rad, Rut, or Rud, being an early name for a mountain.
In the days of the Persian Empire this mountain was called ALA-LAD or Ala-Rud,
and by Asyrians Ur-Ard or Ar-Arda, 1 Ur-urda or A-Rada, in which case A,
as is usual, stands merely for god or phallus, just as in the case of A-dām, perhaps
A-dāv, the Maha-deva. The people who lived around the highlands of Mācis, Herodotus
tells us, were in his day called Ala-rodians. UR, we know, was the first deity
of Kaldia, as EL was of the Jews, and IL and AL of their neighbours. Bar, Hebrew
for mountain, is also Kaldian, and therefore probably Abraham’s God emphasised or
aspirated. The ancient monarchies called most of their great conical peaks El or Al,
as El-Wand or El-Wad, at whose base Media built her famous capital of Ek-batana, Ek
or Ak being the Sun, and therefore the same as El. In like manner we have Al-tag or
Ala-tag, and Nim-rud-tag, north of Lake Van, and further north again, the glorious
culminating point of El-burz, El-brud, or El-rud, king of the Caucasus, 2 which rises
in a god-like peak to a height of nearly 18,500 feet, but never seen uncovered by man,
and overlooking northward all those wondrous lands from which sprang the ancient forefathers
of Europe. At the southern base of this sacred mountain-god lay those Iberian
races from which probably came the settlers in Spain and Ireland who succeeded
decaying Basques and Koothites. The godly name of Elburz is again repeated in all
the great range of wbat we call the Caspians, and here terminates again in a conical
El-burz, whose more ancient name is the Sanskrit or Zoroastrian Deva-Vend, rising to
nearly 20,000 feet above the sea, 3 of which. nearly a third has remained in everlasting
shroud. Here, too, the population have shown their old lineage and faith, for Islami
though they now be, yet at the base of the holy hill is the city of the Shah and the
treaury of all the land.
In the name Deva-Vend or God-Vend we are reminded of the Central Indian
mountain and cognate races who christened it Maha-Deva, declaring it to be the
centre of the world, as Deva-Vend is held to be. 4 In the Turkish name for Ar-a-rat
—Aghur-dag or Agri-dag, I incline to think, seeing it is a volcanic mountain, that
Agri is Agni, fire; for El, Yahveh, and all Joves loved high, conical, burning
mountains, whether in Sinaitic Arabia or far-off Japan. The Alalat which
Chriatianity has fixed upon is a very fierce mountain. The whole surrounding
district quaked in. a terribly destructive way from June to September 1840;
its upper cone then threw off “enormous masses of rock and ice 6000 feet at
a bound, covering portions of the. plains below with desolation.” 5 Mr Leslie and his
authorities state that the valley of the Araxes, which waters its base, is on an average
3000 feet above the sea; that the great ovate cone rises to a height of nearly 17,000
1 Rawlinson’s Anc. Mon., IV. 34.
2 This is not the Range of Elbrus, south of
Caspian, of which I speak further on.
3 Rawlinson, Anc. Mons., III. 3, says 18,000
feet is about the level of the highest peaks, but
19,000 to 20,000 is now usually accepted.
4
See Smith’s Bible Dict.
5
Leslie’s Origin of Man, 222, and Kitto’s Pic.
Bible, I.27.