In the sequel we shall come upon further borrowings and connections of this kind, whose interest and importance has never been suspected by the historian until within the last few years. Take the chief gods and demi-gods to whom the homage of the peoples of Syria and Asia Minor was paid, and you will have no difficulty in acknowledging that, although their names were often changed on the way, Mesopotamia was the starting place of them all. By highways of the sea as well as those on land, the peoples established on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean entered into relations with the tribes of another race who dwelt on the European coasts of the same sea; they introduced them to their divinities and taught them the rites by which those divinities were honoured and the forms under which they were figured. Without abandoning the gods they worshipped in common with their brother Aryans, the Greeks adopted more than one of these Oriental deities. This is not the place to consider the question in detail. We must put aside for the present both the Cybele of Cappadocia and Phrygia and that Ephesian Artemis, who, after being domiciled and naturalized in one of the Hellenic capitals, so obstinately and so long preserved her foreign characteristics; we must for the moment forget Aphrodite, that goddess of a different fortune whose name is enough to call up visions of not a few masterpieces of classic art and poetry. Does not all that we know of this daughter of the sea, of her journeys, of the first temples erected to her on the Grecian coasts and of the peculiar character of her rites and attributes--does not all this justify us in making her a lineal descendant of Zarpanitu, of Mylitta and Istar, of all those goddesses of love and motherhood created by the imagination and worshipped by the piety of the Semites of Chaldæa? On the other hand the more we know of Egypt the less inclined are we to think that any of the gods of her Pantheon were transported to Greece and Italy, at least in the early days of antiquity.