Achaean religion as common to all Greece. But we can check him by many other witnesses, by ancient myths and cults of diverse localities. Zeus was worshipped by some, at least, of the main tribes, when they were in the neighbourhood of Olympus: he is no more Thessalian than he is Dryopian. One of the earliest Hellenic immigrants were perhaps the Minyai, and their aboriginal god was Poseidon. The ritual of Apollo preserves the clearest reminiscence of his entry from the north, and he is the high god of one of the oldest Hellenic tribes, the Dryopes, and the wide diffusion of his cult suggests that aboriginally it was a {50} common inheritance of several stocks. The force of the evidence that may be urged for this view is ignored by Wilamowitz in his brilliant but fallacious theory of the Lycian origin of the god. We must reject the hypothesis of a proto-Hellenic godless period; but, on the other hand, the mere fact that the early Greek religion appears on the same plane as the Mesopotamian, in respect of the worship of personal beings, gives no support at all to the theory of Oriental influence. If it is to be accepted, it must be sustained by more special evidence. CHAPTER IV. Anthropomorphism and Theriomorphism in Asia Minor and the Mediterranean. {51} A comparison made according to the test we have just applied is not so important as that which arises in the second stage of the inquiry. Assuming that the peoples on the east and west of the Aegean were already on the same religious plane when the first glimmer of what may be called history begins, can we discern certain striking resemblances or differences in their conception and imagination of divinity, sufficient to prove or disprove the theory of borrowing or of a movement across large areas of certain waves of religious influence emanating from a fixed centre?