But such general traits of resemblance in two developed polytheisms deceive no trained inquirer; and it would be childish to base a theory of borrowing on them. What is far more important are the marked differences in the nature-side of the Greek polytheism, as compared with the Sumerian-Babylonian. In the latter, the solar-element was very strong, though perhaps not so omnipresent as some Assyriologists assure us. On the contrary, in the proto-Hellenic system it was strikingly weak, so far as we can interpret the evidence. The earliest Hellenes certainly regarded the Sun as a personal animate being, though the word Helios did not necessarily connote for them an anthropomorphic god. But the insignificance of his figure in the Homeric poems agrees well with the facts of actual cult. As I have pointed out in the last volume of my _Cults_,[111.1] it was only at Rhodes that Helios was a great personal god, appealing to the faith and affections of the people, revered as their ancestor and the author of their civilisation, and descending, we may believe, from the period of the Minoan culture[111.2] with which Rhodes was closely associated in legend. And it appears from the evidence of legend and Minoan art that sun-worship was of some power in the pre-Hellenic Aegean civilisation. In the Mycenaean epoch he may have had power in Corinth, but his cult faded there in the historic age before that of Athena and Poseidon. The developed Hellene preferred the more personal {112} deity, whose name did not so obviously suggest a special phenomenon of nature. And if he inherited or adopted certain solar personages, as some think he adopted a sun-god Ares from Thrace, he seems to have transformed them by some mental process so as to obliterate the traces of the original nature-perception. Even more significant for our purpose is the comparison of the two regions from the point of view of lunar-cult. We have sufficiently noted already the prominence of the moon-god Sin in the Babylonian pantheon, an august figure of a great religion: and among all the Semitic peoples the moon was a male personality, as it appears to have been for the Vedic Indians and other Aryan peoples. The Hellenic imagination here presents to us this salient difference, that the personal moon is feminine, and she seems to have enjoyed the scantiest cult of all the great powers of Nature. Not that anywhere in Greece she was wholly without worship.[112.1] She is mentioned in a vague record as one of the divinities to whom νηφάλια, “wineless offerings,” were consecrated in Athens: she had an ancient place in the aboriginal religion of Arcadia; of her worship in other places the records are usually late and insignificant. The great Minoan goddess may have attracted to herself some lunar significance, but this aspect of her was not pronounced.