As regards the emblem of divinity, the cult-object set up in the shrine to attract and to mark the presence of the deity, the Mesopotamian religion had, as we have seen, already evolved the eikon or image at some period considerably earlier than the second millennium, and the statue of the god or goddess had become an important factor of early ritual: only the emblem of Asshur remained aniconic.[225.3] Of equally early vogue was the image, whether human or theriomorphic, in Egyptian cult. Again, the early Hittite monuments reveal it clearly, though aniconic fetiches appear also on the reliefs of Boghaz-Keui. But it is probable that the Western Semites, and the tribes of Arabia before 1200 B.C., {226} and many of them for centuries after, preferred the aniconic emblem, the “Ashera” or post, or heap of stones or pillar, to the iconic statue; in fact, that temple idolatry in its developed forms as it presents itself in later Mediterranean history was alien to the old and genuine tradition of Semitic public worship. Iconic representations of divinities may indeed be found in Western Semitic regions, and some of these may be of great antiquity; such as the silver statue that Thutmose III. (of the fifteenth century B.C.) carried off from Megiddo and the Lebanon,[226.1] or the “Astarte”-plaques found on the site of Gezer. But in Semitic communities of the earlier period such objects belonged rather to the private religion, and the public service centred round the sacred pillar or stone, as was the case at Mecca both before and after Islam arose: the evidence for this has been carefully given and estimated by Robertson Smith and Sir Arthur Evans.[226.2] The same statement holds of many of the non-Semitic peoples of Western Anatolia; in Phrygia, for instance, the earliest emblem of Kybele was the rude pillar or cone-shaped stone, and this survived down to late times in the worship of the Anatolian goddess in some of the Greek cities on the Asiatic coast. The recent discoveries in the regions of the Minoan and Mycenaean culture reveal the same phenomenon: the cults in this area of the Aegean in the second millennium were in the main aniconic, the favourite emblem being {227} the pillar or tree-trunk, while in ancient Crete the axe and even the cross has been found.[227.1] Where the divinity appears in full human shape, as the snake-goddess in the chapel of the cross, the lion-guarded goddess or the god descending in the air above the pillar on the Minoan seals, these figures cannot, or need not, be interpreted as actual temple-idols. And students of the religion of classical Greece are familiar with the ample evidence of the aniconic tradition in the λίθοι ἀργοί, and the cone-shaped pillars and stocks that served as divine emblems in the later temples of Greece.[227.2]