Note 62.2 — Chapter IV · Anthropomorphism and Theriomorphism in Asia Minor and the Mediterranean.

As regards the test, then, that we are at present applying, it seems that the Hittite and the Mesopotamian religions were more or less on the same plane, though we may suspect that theriolatry was stronger in the former. It is also important for our purpose to register in passing the clear proof of certain religious approximations, probably in the second millennium B.C., between the Hittites and the Assyrian-Babylonian kingdom. The Hittite god Teshup, with the double-headed hammer or axe and the forked lightning in his hand, is of close kin and similar in type to the Canaanite, Syrian, and Babylonian Ramman-Adad, the god of storms.62.2 But the evidence does not yet seem to me to make it clear which people or group of peoples was in this case the borrower, which the lender. And the same doubt arises in respect of the striking art-type of the divinity standing on the lion; we find it in the early Hittite monuments, such as the Boghaz-Keui sculptured slabs; and again on the relief of Gargamich, on which is a winged male deity standing on a lion and a priest behind him, also on a lion;62.3 and later among the Tarsos representations of the Hittite Sandon: it was in vogue at the Syrian Bambyke and at Babylon. The assumption of Perrot62.4 is that it was of Babylonian origin, but the art-chronology does not seem to speak decisively in this matter. It is not necessary here to prejudge this difficult problem: it does not directly affect our present question, as the type of the goddess with lions comes into Hellas only at a later period. As regards the other Anatolian peoples who came into close contact with the Hellenes, we may find abiding influences of certain Hittite religious ideas and motives of religious art. We may admit that the lion-borne goddess of Boghaz-Keui is the prototype of Kybele, even the crenelated headdress that she wears suggesting the turreted diadem of the later goddess: it is likely that the ancient type of Teshup, the weather-god with hammer or axe and the lightning, survived in Commagene in the cult-figure that was afterwards interpreted as Jupiter Dolichenus: and it may have influenced the ideas about the thunder-god in Pontus, as a primitive relief of a god brandishing a thunderbolt and holding a shield has been found near Amasia.63.1 Speaking generally, we must pronounce the native pre-Hellenic religious art of the Asia Minor littoral, of Phrygia, Lydia, Caria, anthropomorphic, so far as it tried at all to embody the imagined form of the divinity. The record is generally blurred by the later Hellenic influences. But we have at least in Phrygia rude images of the pre-Hellenic Cybele; the intention of these is anthropomorphic, and in the rough outline of the goddess’s form as hewn out of the rock of Sipylos above Smyrna, the Hellenes could discern their sorrowing Niobe. Where the anthropomorphism fails, as in the Phrygian monument, which shows Cybele seated with a phiale and human-shaped in other respects, but with a head fashioned like “the round capital of a pillar,”64.1 the influence of the aniconic fetich may be the cause. At any rate, we have no clear trace of theriomorphism either in the legend nor in the monuments of the great mother, the Kybele of Phrygia, or the Mā of Cappadocia. The power of the mountain-goddess was incarnate in the lions, but we have no ground for saying that she herself was ever worshipped as a lion.