with her or is descending from the sky armed with spear and shield,[65.5] and sometimes rayed; thirdly, the goddess with the snake as her familiar. {66} To this extent, then, the Minoan-Mycenaean peoples were on the same plane of religion as those of Mesopotamia: and the record of the anthropomorphic divinity can be traced in the Aegean area back to the fourth millennium B.C. by the nude figures in stone of a goddess of fecundity with arms pressed across her breasts, a type belonging to the Neolithic period. In passing, let us observe that neither the earliest prehistoric art of the Mediterranean nor the great religious types of the Minoan divinities recall the art style of Mesopotamia. But this developed anthropomorphism of the early Aegean civilisation is not the whole story. Modern research has accumulated evidence that seems to point to a theriomorphic religion in Crete and in Mycenaean Greece which has been supposed by some to have preceded the former in order of time and in the logical process of evolution, and which at any rate survived by the side of it. Traces of the same phenomenon have been noted in the Hittite area, and more faintly in the valley of the Euphrates. The first modern writer who proclaimed with emphasis the theriomorphic elements in the prehistoric religions of Greece was Mr. A. Lang in his _Custom and Myth_, connecting it with a theory of totemism that does not concern us here. Afterwards, a systematic treatment of the problem in the light of the monuments of the Cretan and Mycenaean periods was presented by Mr. Cook in a paper published in the _Hellenic Journal_ of 1894 on “Animal Worship in the Mycenaean Age”; and again in 1895 by an essay on “The Bee in Greek Mythology”: a very full collection of the materials, with some exposition of important religious theory, will be found in De Visser’s treatise, _De Graecorum Diis non referentibus speciem humanam_ {67} (1900). Miss J. Harrison has worked further along the same lines, and has published some special results in her paper read before the Congress of the History of Religions, 1908, and published in its _Transactions_, on “Bird and Pillar Worship in relation to Ouranian Divinities.”