As regards Aphrodite, few students of Greek religion would now assign her to the original Aryan-Hellenic polytheism. Most still regard her as coming to the Greek people from the Semitic area of the Astarte cult. And this was the view that I formerly developed in the second volume of my _Cults_. But at that time we were all ignorant of the facts of Minoan-Mycenaean religion, and some of us were deceived concerning the antiquity of the Phoenician settlements in Cyprus and Hellas. The recently discovered evidence points, I think, inevitably to the theory that Sir Arthur Evans supports; that the goddess of Cyprus, the island where the old Minoan culture lived longest, is one form of the great goddess of that gifted Aegean people, who had developed her into various manifestations through long centuries of undisturbed religious life. Let us finally observe that it is just these names, Artemis, Athena, Aphrodite, that have hitherto defied linguistic {98} explanation on either Aryan or Semitic phonetic principles. We do not yet know the language of King Minos. A cursory and dogmatic answer may now be given to the two questions posed above. The Aryan Hellenes did not bring with them the supremacy of the goddess, for the idea was not natural to them: they did not borrow it from any Semitic people in the second millennium, for at that time it was not natural to the Semites: they found it on the soil of the Aegean lands, as a native growth of an old Mediterranean religion, a strong plant that may be buried under the deposits of alien creeds, but is always forcing its head up to the light again. Therefore in tracing goddess-cult from the Euphrates valley to the western Aegean shores, as a test of the influence of the East on the West, we are brought up sharply at this point. The Western world is divided from the Eastern by this very phenomenon that the older scholars used to regard as proving a connection. And it may well have been the Western cult that influenced the western Semites. CHAPTER VI. The Deities as Nature-Powers. {99} So far as we have gone our main question must be still regarded as an open one. We may now compare the particular conceptions concerning divinity that prevailed at the period to which our search is limited, in the valley of the Euphrates, and in the other communities that are in our route of comparison. Many striking points of general similarity will present themselves, upon which we must not lay too much weight for our argument, since all polytheisms possess a certain family likeness: of more importance will be certain strikingly dissimilar features, if we find any.