>>21090550The Greeks also refered to the planet Saturn as the star of Helios, that is the star of the Sun. they actually identified it outright as Helios.
Thus, for instance, Plato (or Philip of Opus wrote that preeminent among the planets for its slowness was the one whom "some call ... Kronos," which is Saturn.
But, in the earliest copies of the text, the name used was not Kronos but, rather, Helios.
It was only later copyists, who could not understand why the planet Saturn was here being alluded to by the name of the Sun, who "corrected" the text to read "Kronos,"
the "accepted" Greek name of the planet Saturn.
the practice of "correcting" such texts changing the name "Helios" to read "Kronos" was quite common among later copyists.
To Porphyry, originally named Malchus, the Greek historian and Neoplatonist from Tyre, in Syria, Kronos/Saturn was also called Helios as it was to Rhetorios and Claudius Ptolemy himself.
All of which further indicates that the Ptolemaic identification of Ra as Kronos/Saturn was in keeping with the belief of the time.
As it happens, the name "Helios" closely resembles the Greek transliteration of the Canaanite/Phoenician "El," that is "Elos," a deity who, as Philo Byblius proclaimed, was the same as Kronos/Saturn.
Thus a confusion between the names Elos and Helios has been suggested to be at the root of this belief.
This point is somewhat tacky because, in my opinion, the Greek Helios, together with similar divinities incorporating the same philological root, does ultimately derive from EL.
