Crossword-Solution: OANNES 6 letters, 2 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 6

Among the foremost of these questions were three: "Whence came language?" "Which was the first language?" "How came the diversity of language?" The answer to the first of these was very simple: each people naturally held that language was given it directly or indirectly by some special or national deity of its own; thus, to the Chaldeans by Oannes, to the Egyptians by Thoth, to the Hebrews by Jahveh.

This is the Aos (a form which confirms the reading Aa) of Damascius, and the Oannes of the extracts from Berosus, who states that he was "a creature endowed with reason, with a body like that of a fish, and under the fish's head another head, with feet below, like those of a man, with a fish's tail." This description applies fairly well to certain bas-reliefs from Nimroud in the British Museum.

Whether the deities clothed in a fish's skin in the Nimroud gallery be Dagon or not is uncertain--they may be intended for Êa or Aa, the Oannes of Berosus, who was represented in this way.

And such mere methodised savagery was to discover the hidden things of nature better than _a priori_ deductions from the nature of Ormuzd--perhaps to give a history of the past, in which Oannes would be altogether ignored! Decidedly it were better to burn this man at once.

The Euphrates itself, at the mouth of which Oannes landed, is a thing of yesterday compared with a Belemnite; and even the liberal chronology of magian cosmogony fixes the beginning of the world only at a time when other applications of Zadig's method afford convincing evidence that, could we have been there to see, things would have looked very much as they do now.