Note 89.1 — Chapter V · The Predominance of the Goddess.

Coming now to the Asia-Minor shore, where in the first millennium B.C. the Hellenic colonisation and culture flourished, we find the traces of a great goddess-cult discoverable on every important site; though recorded only by later writers, as a rule, and interpreted to us by the later Greek names, such as Artemis, Leto, Aphrodite, more rarely Athena, we can still discern clearly that she belongs to a pre-Hellenic stock. The evidence of this can be gathered from many sources, and it is unnecessary to detail it here. What is more important, and not so easy, is to detect clear proof of the predominance of the goddess over the god, a phenomenon that has not yet presented itself clearly in the Semitic communities, except at Sidon and perhaps Byblos. We find goddess-cult in Cilicia, where “Artemis Sarpedonia” is a name that trails with it Minoan associations;89.1 but, as Dr. Frazer has pointed out,89.2 at least at Tarsos and Olba it appears that the male deity was the dominant power. At the former city a long series of coins attests the supremacy of Baal-Tars and Sandon-Herakles. At Olba the ruling priesthood were called the Τευκρίδαι, and claim descent from Teukros and Aias, but Greek inscriptions giving such names as “Teukros” the priest, son of Tarkuaris, support the view that Teukros is a Hellenisation of the divine Hittite name Tarku. It is in Lycia where we ought, in accordance with a popular theory, to find the clearest proof of goddess-supremacy; for we know that the Lycians had the matrilinear family system, and this was supposed by Robertson Smith to lead logically to that religious product.89.3 And recently we have heard Professor Wilamowitz89.4 brilliantly expound the theory that Leto was the aboriginal mother-goddess of Lycia, called there in the Lycian tongue “Lada,” and worshipped as supreme with her son Apollo, both of whom the Hellenes found there, and while they transformed Lada “the Lady-goddess” into Leto, surnamed Apollo Λητοίδης, in obedience to the Lycian rule of calling a son after his mother. And where a son is worshipped merely as the son of his mother, we may regard the mother-goddess as supreme. The theory about Apollo’s Lycian origin, which, I think, contradicts all the important facts, does not concern us here. It is his view that Leto is the aboriginal and paramount divinity of Lycia which we would wish to test. So far as it rests on the equation between Leto and Lada, its philology is bad; for, as Dr. Cowley has pointed out on the evidence of Lycian-Greek transcribed names, the Greeks would not have transcribed Lada as Leto. Furthermore, the geography of the Leto-cult gives no vraisemblance to the theory of its Lycian origin; neither have we any proof at all of the cult of any goddess in Lycia at an early period, though no doubt it existed; the coin of Myra, showing a goddess emerging from the split trunk of a tree,90.1 is of the Imperial period, but preserves an ancient legend and an archaic idol-type. But the earliest fact of Lycian religion recorded is the predominance of Apollo, and the Lycians maintained him as their chief divinity throughout their history and long after the very early influences of Hellenic colonisation had waned. The inscriptions of Lycia that mention Leto are all of the later period; her temple near Xanthos and her two holy groves on the coast that Strabo mentions90.2 are just on the track along which the earliest Hellenic influence travelled: and the most tenable view is that the Hellenes introduced her. In Caria, at Labranda, and again in the vicinity of Stratonikeia, we have proof of the early supremacy of a great god whom the Hellenes called Zeus, attaching to him in the latter centre of cult the Carian name of Panamaros, and associating him with a native goddess called Hera or Hekate, who did not claim to be the predominant partner.91.1