GOLD. Among the Hindus, gold. silver, and copper are all held sacred, but a special sacredness is ascribed to gold. " When a man is at the point of death. a little gold, Ganges water, and a leaf of the tulsi or basil plant are placed in his mouth, so that these sacred articles may accompany him to the other world. So valuable as a means of securing a pure death is the presence of gold in the mouth that some castes have small pieces inserted into a couple of their upper teeth, in order that wherever and whenever they may die, the gold may be present to purify them " (R. V. Russell and R. B. Hira L51). According to G. Elliot Smith (Dr., 191S) gold first acquired its value from being used for making models of shells (especially cowries). In course of time people who lived at a distance from the sea experienced difficulty in obtaining the-shells which they wore as amulets on girdles and necklaces. Hence they took to manufactur ing, at first in clay and stone, imitations of the shells. " But at an early period in their history the inhabitants of the deserts between the Nile and the Red Sea (Hathor's special province) discovered that they could make more durable and attractive models of cowries and other shells by using the plastic yellow metal which was lying about in these deserts unused and unappreciated. This prac
tice first gave to the metal gold an arbitrary value which it did not possess before. For the peculiar life-giving attributes of the shells modelled in the yellow metal came to be transferred to the gold itself." Thus gold itself acquired the reputation of being a giver of life. Elliot Smith points out that the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphic sign for gold was a picture of a necklace of golden amulets which probably represented cowries; and he sug gests that this emblem became the determinative of the Great Mother Hathor, not only because she was originally the personification of the life-giving shells, but also because she was the guardian deity both of the Eastern wadys where the gold was found and of the Red Sea coasts where the cowries were obtained. Hence she became the Golden Hathor, the prototype of the Golden Aphrodite.