[Footnote 1:  I have analyzed these words in a note to another work, and need not repeat the matter here, the less so, as I am not aware that the etymology has been questioned.  See Myths of the New World, 2d Ed., p. 183, note.]

The position of Ioskeha in mythology is also shown by the other name under which he was, perhaps, even more familiar to most of the Iroquois.  This is Tharonhiawakon, which is also a verbal form of the third person, with the dual sign, and literally means, “He holds (or holds up) the sky with his two arms."[1] In other words, he is nearly allied to the ancient Aryan Dyaus, the Sky, the Heavens, especially the Sky in the daytime.

[Footnote 1:  A careful analysis of this name is given by Father J.A.  Cuoq, probably the best living authority on the Iroquois, in his Lexique de la Langue Iroquoise, p. 180 (Montreal, 1882).  Here also the Iroquois followed precisely the line of thought of the ancient Egyptians.  Shu, in the religion of Heliopolis, represented the cosmic light and warmth, the quickening, creative principle.  It is he who, as it is stated in the inscriptions, “holds up the heavens,” and he is depicted on the monuments as a man with uplifted arms who supports the vault of heaven, because it is the intermediate light that separates the earth from the sky.  Shu was also god of the winds; in a passage of the Book of the Dead, he is made to say:  “I am Shu, who drives the winds onward to the confines of heaven, to the confines of the earth, even to the confines of space.”  Again, like Ioskeha, Shu is said to have begotten himself in the womb of his mother, Nu or Nun, who was, like Ataensic, the goddess of water, the heavenly ocean, the primal sea.  Tiele, History of the Egyptian Religion, pp. 84-86.]

The signification of the conflict with his twin brother is also clearly seen in the two names which the latter likewise bears in the legends.  One of these is that which I have given, Tawiscara, which, there is little doubt, is allied to the root, tiokaras, it grows dark.  The other is Tehotennhiaron, the root word of which is kannhia, the flint stone.  This name he received because, in his battle with his brother, the drops of blood which fell from his wounds were changed into flints.[1] Here the flint had the same meaning which I have already pointed out in Algonkin myth, and we find, therefore, an absolute identity of mythological conception and symbolism between the two nations.

[Footnote 1:  Cuoq, Lexique de la Langue Iroquoise, p. 180, who gives a full analysis of the name.]

Could these myths have been historically identical?  It is hard to disbelieve it.  Yet the nations were bitter enemies.  Their languages are totally unlike.  These same similarities present themselves over such wide areas and between nations so remote and of such different culture, that the theory of a parallelism of development is after all the more credible explanation.