It seems certain that at the time of Homer the habit of representing Hera under the form of a cow, or with the attributes of a cow, had fallen into disuse and been abandoned; and that, consequently, the catastrophe of the complete destruction of Mycenæ should be referred to an ante-Homeric epoch. In fact, considering the character of the monuments I have discovered, I see no objection whatever to referring it to the period of the invasion of the Heraclides. And indeed, the destruction of Mycenæ by the Heraclides would explain also the singular fact that Orestes never reigned at Mycenæ. I cannot discover any trace of Egyptian influence in the art of Mycenæ; but the multitude of objects which certainly came from Egypt--like the immense golden cow-heads, the ostrich egg, the sphinx (see fig. 277), and the pieces of Egyptian porcelain--forces us to the conclusion that there must have been relations between the city and that country. The strongest testimony that such relations existed is the worship of the lunar divinity Hera under the form of a cow--a divinity whom I have proved (see the note on Hera Boöpis at the end of Chapter I.) to be identical with the Egyptian goddess Isis, who was similarly worshipped in Egypt in the form of a woman with the horns of a cow. Further, I may recall the fact that Isis was said to have been born at Argos (Diodorus Sic., I. xxiv. 25; Apollodorus, II. i. 3), and that Apis, grandson of the Argive river-god Inachos, and nephew of the cow-faced lunar goddess Io, was at first king of Argos; that from his name this town and the whole Peloponnesus was called Apia; that Apis at length made over to his brother his Grecian dominion, and became king of Egypt (Eusebius, Chron. I. 96, 127, 130, edit. Aucher; Augustine, de Civ. Dei, xviii. 5); that after his death he was worshipped in Egypt under the name of Serapis and the form of a bull. In the same way the Greek myth makes the Argive cow-faced goddess to migrate to Egypt, where she brings into the world Epaphos, which is only a second name for the bull Apis. But, according to Diodorus Sic. (I. xxiv. 25), Apollodorus (II. i. 3) and Hygin (145), Io was identical with Isis. All these Greek myths seem to prove, not that the worship of the cow-faced moon-goddess came into Argos _from_ Egypt, but that, on the contrary, it was carried _into_ Egypt from Mycenæ or Argos; and perhaps Egyptologists, by determining the period at which the worship of Isis began in Egypt, can give us an idea of the antiquity of the relations between that country and Mycenæ. In fact, the worship of the moon-goddess under the form of a cow _could_ not have been brought from Egypt to Mycenæ, but necessarily _must_ have been introduced from Mycenæ into Egypt, since Io was distinctly a Pelasgian goddess; she had a celebrated temple at Byzantium, and the legend even attributes the foundation of that city to her daughter Keroessa, also called "she who