Coming now to the Asia-Minor shore, where in the first millennium B.C.
the Hellenic colonisation and culture flourished, we find the traces
of a great goddess-cult discoverable on every important site; though
recorded only by later writers, as a rule, and interpreted to us by
the later Greek names, such as Artemis, Leto, Aphrodite, more rarely
Athena, we can still discern clearly that she belongs to a
pre-Hellenic stock. The evidence of this can be gathered from many
sources, and it is unnecessary {89} to detail it here. What is more
important, and not so easy, is to detect clear proof of the
predominance of the goddess over the god, a phenomenon that has not
yet presented itself clearly in the Semitic communities, except at
Sidon and perhaps Byblos. We find goddess-cult in Cilicia, where
“Artemis Sarpedonia” is a name that trails with it Minoan
associations;[89.1] but, as Dr. Frazer has pointed out,[89.2] at
least at Tarsos and Olba it appears that the male deity was the
dominant power. At the former city a long series of coins attests the
supremacy of Baal-Tars and Sandon-Herakles. At Olba the ruling
priesthood were called the Τευκρίδαι, and claim descent from Teukros
and Aias, but Greek inscriptions giving such names as “Teukros” the
priest, son of Tarkuaris, support the view that Teukros is a
Hellenisation of the divine Hittite name Tarku. It is in Lycia where
we ought, in accordance with a popular theory, to find the clearest
proof of goddess-supremacy; for we know that the Lycians had the
matrilinear family system, and this was supposed by Robertson Smith to
lead logically to that religious product.[89.3] And recently we have
heard Professor Wilamowitz[89.4] brilliantly expound the theory that
Leto was the aboriginal mother-goddess of Lycia, called there in the
Lycian tongue “Lada,” and worshipped as supreme with her son Apollo,
both of whom the Hellenes found there, and while they transformed Lada
“the Lady-goddess” into Leto, surnamed Apollo Λητοίδης, in obedience
to the Lycian rule of calling a son after his mother. And where a son
is worshipped merely as the son of his {90} mother, we may regard the
mother-goddess as supreme. The theory about Apollo’s Lycian origin,
which, I think, contradicts all the important facts, does not concern
us here. It is his view that Leto is the aboriginal and paramount
divinity of Lycia which we would wish to test. So far as it rests on
the equation between Leto and Lada, its philology is bad; for, as Dr.
Cowley has pointed out on the evidence of Lycian-Greek transcribed
names, the Greeks would not have transcribed Lada as Leto.
Furthermore, the geography of the Leto-cult gives no _vraisemblance_
to the theory of its Lycian origin; neither have we any proof at all
of the cult of any goddess in Lycia at an early period, though no
doubt it existed; the coin of Myra, showing a goddess emerging from
the split trunk of a tree,[90.1] is of the Imperial period, but
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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