Dispersion of the Swastika

man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered." (1) "Tell the stars, if thou be able to number them * * * so shall thy seed be. * * * As the father of many nations," etc. We all know the story of Sarai, how, when she and Abraham had all riches and power on earth, it was as naught while they were childless, and how their greatest blessing was the Divine promise of an heir, and that their greatest happiness was over the birth of Isaac. This may be o proof of the symbolism of the Swastika, but it shows how, in high antiquity, man's happiness in his children was such as makes the Swastika mark, in the position indicated, equally a symbol of good fortune and blessing as it was when put on the spindle-whorls of Hissarlik, the vases of Greece, or the fibulæ of Etruria.
      The age of the Trojan cities. --- It may be well to consider for a moment the age of epoch of these prehistoric Trojan cities on the hill of Hissarlik. Professor Virchow was appealed to by Schliemann for his opinion. He says: (2)

      Other scholars have been inclined to ascribe the oldest cities of Hissarlik to the Neolithic age, because remarkable weapons and utensils of polished stone are found in them. * * * This conception is unjustified and inadmissible. To the third century A. D. belongs the surface of the fortress hill of Hissarlik, which still lies above the Macodonian wall; and the oldest "cities" --- although not only polished stones but also chipped flakes of chalcedony and obsidian occur in them --- nevertheless fall within the age of metals, for even in the first utensils of copper, gold, and even silver were dug up. No stone people, properly so called, dwelt upon the fortress hill of Hissarlik, so far as it has been uncovered.

      Virchow's opinion that none of the cities of Hissarlik were in the stone age may be correct, but the reason he gave is certainly doubtful. He says they come within the age of metals, for , or because, "utensils of copper, gold, and even silver were dug up among the ruins of the first city." That the metals, gold, silver, or copper, were used by aborigines, is no evidence that they were in a metal age, as it has been assigned and understood by prehistoric archæologhists. The great principle upon which the names of the respective prehistoric ages --- stone, bronze, and iron --- were given, was that these materials were used for cutting and similar implements. The use of gold and silver or any metal for ornamental purposes has never been considered by archæologists as synchronous with a metal age. Indeed, in the United States there are great numbers of aboriginal cutting implements of copper, of which the U. S. National Museum possesses a collection of five or six hundred; yet they were not in sufficient number to , and they did not, supersede the use of stone as the principal materials for cutting implements, and so do not establish a copper age in America. In Paleolithic times bone was largely used as material for utensils and ornaments. Bone was habitually in use for one purpose or another, yet no one ever pretended that this establishes a bone age. In countries and localities where stone is scarce and shell abundant, cutting implements were, in prehistoric times, made of shell; and chisels or hatchets of shell, corresponding to the polished stone hatchet, where prevalent whereever the conditions were favorable, yet nobody ever called it an age of shell. So, in the ruined cities of Hissarlik, the first five of them abounded in stone implements peculiar to the Neolithic age, while there may have been large numbers of implements and utensils of other materials, yet this did not change it from the polished stone age. In any event, the reason given by Virchow --- i. e., that the use, undisputed, of copper, gold, and silver by the inhabitants of these cities --- is not evidence to change their culture status from that denominated as the polished stone age or period.
      Professor Virchow subsequently does sufficient justice to the antiquity of Schliemann's discoveries and says (3) while "it is impossible to assign these strata to the stone age, yet they are indications of what is the oldest known settlement in Asia Minor of a people of prehistoric times of some advance in civilization," and (4) that "no place in Europe is known which could be put in direct connection with any one of the six lower cities of Hissarlik."
      Professor Sayce also gives his opinion on the age of these ruins: (5)

      The antiquities, therefore, unearthed by Dr. Schliemann at Troy, acquire for us a double interest. They carry us back to the later stone ages of the Aryan race.

Africa.

Egypt.

     A consensus of the opinions of antiquarians is that the Swastika had no foothold among the Egyptians. Prof. Max Müller is to this opinion, as is also Count Goblet d'Alviella. (6)
      Waring (7) says:

      The only sign approaching the fylfot in Egyptian Hieroglyphics that we have met is shown in fig. 3, pl. 41, where it forms one of the hieroglyphs of Isis, but is not very similar to our fylfot.

      Mr. Greg says: (8) "In Egypt the fylfot does not occur." Many other authors say the same. Yet many specimens of the Swastika have been found in Egypt (fig. 130 and 136). Professor Goodyear, (9) says:

      The earliest dated Swastikas are of the third millennium B. C., and occur on the foreign Cyprian and Carian (!) pottery fragments of the time of the twelfth dynasty (in Egypt), discovered by Mr. Flinders Petrie in 1889. (Kahun, Gurob, and Hawara, pl. 27, Nos. 162 and 173.)