There is another distinction observed in Greek ritual, that becomes of some importance in the later history of ascetic purity, that between wineless offerings (νηφάλια) and those accompanied with wine: the former being preferred by the powers of the lower world,[231.3] though not invariably, and certainly not by the departed hero. However this distinction arose--and no single hypothesis explains all the cases--it was not a Semitic tradition, taught in early days to Hellas. For the {232} Semitic divinities, including Jahwé, have a genial liking for wine “which cheereth God and man”;[232.1] nor have we any Semitic example of a taboo on it, except possibly a late Nabataean inscription from the neighbourhood of Palmyra, mentioning “the god who drinks no wine.”[232.2] Such a phrase would certainly not apply to the deities of Babylon; even the sun-god, who in Hellas appears to have been a total abstainer, is offered wine in the Babylonian service,[232.3] and, according to one verse in the _Epic of Creation_, the deities actually get drunk,[232.4] a grossness which, in the mythic imagination of Hellas, is only imagined as possible for Dionysos. We have the right to say, then, that the avoidance of wine in certain religious services of Hellas helps to confirm the impression of its early independence of Semitic influences. The Hellenic rule may, in certain cases, have been derived from an older Aegean tradition; for two of the deities to whom it was applied, Helios and Aphrodite, may be believed to have been bequeathed to Greece by the Minoan-Mycenaean religion; and wine appears to have been prohibited in certain ceremonies of the Phrygian goddess,[232.5] and of a goddess of Caria.[232.6] These are differences of some importance, and doubtless of great antiquity between the ritual of East and West; more insignificant, yet of considerable value for {233} our present question, is the fact that incense was a regular accompaniment of the Babylonian sacrifice, but did not come into religious use in Greece till some time after the period of Homer. The fact itself we may consider as proved, both by Homer’s silence about it, and by the Homeric use of the word θύος, which means “victim,” and never “incense,” as in later Greek it came to mean. Had the influence of the Mesopotamian culture been as strong on Greece in the second millennium as it came to be from 800 B.C. onwards, we should certainly have expected that the religious use of incense, which is very attractive and spreads easily from one race to another, would have been adopted by Greek ritual before the time of Homer.