The antiquity of Olympia is proved by the presence there of those elements of primitive religion which preceded the worship of the Olympian deities. The altar of Cronus on the hill top which bore his name recalled a sovereignty earlier than that of Zeus. An ancient oracle of earth preceded the oracle of Zeus. Of the worship of the powers of the underworld there is abundant evidence at Olympia, as in the rest of the Peloponnese; the priestess of Demeter Chamyne, for example, was exempted from the rule that excluded women from Olympia, and had her place of honour in the stadium opposite the seats of the Hellanodicae. In Hera, whose worship at Olympia was earlier than that of Zeus, we may probably recognize a Hellenized form of the great Mother Goddess of the Aegean world. Lastly, that Pelops claimed precedence of Zeus is clear from the fact that the athletes sacrificed to Pelops first and then to Zeus. At his tomb within the Altis, originally a barrow, only afterwards enclosed in a shrine, he was worshipped with all the ceremonial due to the dead, and every year the youths of the Peloponnese lashed themselves upon his grave till the blood ran down.[46] Yet it does not follow that the cult of Pelops was pre-Achaean. We cannot clearly draw the line between what belonged to the Achaeans and what to the original inhabitants. There was no violent breach, but rather a gradual fusion of the races, in the course of which the Achaeans made their own much of the earlier civilization. Certainly the cult of heroes continued all through Greek history; in later days even noted athletes were canonized. The ancient writings of the Eleans, according to Pausanias, ascribed the institution of the games to the Idaean Heracles, one of the Cretan Curetes to whom the infant Zeus was entrusted. But to Pindar and Bacchylides the games are associated with the tomb of Pelops. Pelops, as the story goes, came to Olympia as a suitor for the hand of Hippodameia, whose father Oenomaus challenged all her suitors to a chariot-race, and slew with his spear all whom he defeated. Thirteen suitors had been slain when Pelops came and, by the aid of Myrtilus, the charioteer of Oenomaus, who removed the lynch-pins from his master’s chariot wheels, slew him and won his bride and kingdom. This story, afterwards represented on the chest of Cypselus and on the pediments of the temple of Zeus, was commemorated by the earliest monuments of the Altis. Besides the tomb of Pelops himself, there was an ancient wooden pillar said to be the only remnant of the house of Oenomaus, which was struck by lightning,[47] and also the Hippodamium, apparently a funeral mound, surrounded afterwards by a wall, where the women of Elis every year offered sacrifice.