620 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1913. 



When we come to the religious elements the same Asianic relation- 

 ship is equally well marked. The great goddess of Minoan Crete had 

 sisters east of the Aegean even more long-lived than herself. The 

 Korybantes and their divine child range in the same direction, and 

 the fetish cult of the double axe is inseparable from that of the 

 Carian labrys which survived in the worship of the Zeus of 

 Labraunda. 



Some of the most characteristic religious scenes on Minoan signets 

 are most intelligible in the light supplied by cults that survived to 

 historic times in the lands east of the Aegean. Throughout those re- 

 gions we are confronted by a perpetually recurrent figure of a goddess 

 and her youthful satellite — son or paramour, martial or effeminate 

 by turns, but always mortal, and mourned in various forms. Attis, 

 Adonis, or Thammuz, we may add the Ilian Anchises,'^ all had tombs 

 within her temple walls. Not least, the Cretan Zeus himself knew 

 death, and the fabled site of his monument on Mount Juktas proves 

 to coincide with a votive shrine over which the goddess rather than 

 the god originally presided. So too, on the Minoan and Mycenaean 

 signets we see the warrior youth before the seated goddess, and in 

 one case actually seem to have a glimpse of the " tomb " within its 

 temenos. Beside it is hung up the little body shield, a mourning 

 votary is bowed toward it, the sacred tree and pillar shrine of the 

 goddess are hard by.^ In another parallel scene the female mourner 

 lies prone above the shield itself, the divine connection of which is 

 shown by the sacred emblems seen above, which combine the double 

 axe and life symbol.^ 



Doubtless some of these elements, notably in Crete, were absorbed 

 by later Greek cult, but their characteristic form has nothing to do 

 with the traditions of primitive Aryan religion. They are essentially 

 non-Hellenic. 



An endeavor has been made, and has been recently repeated, to 

 get over the difficulty thus presented by supposing that the culture 

 exemplified by the Minoan palaces of Crete belongs to two stages, 

 to which the names of " Carian " and "Achaean " have been given. 

 Rough and ready lines of division between " older " and " later " 

 palaces have been laid down to suit this ethnographic system. It may 

 be confidently stated that a fuller acquaintance with the archeological 

 evidence is absolutely fatal to theories such as these. 



The more the stratigraphical materials are studied, and it is these 

 that form our main scientific basis, the more manifest it appears that 



1 " Tombs " of Anchises — the baetylic pillar may also be regarded as sepulchral — were 

 erected in many places, from the Phrygian Ida to the sanctuary of Aphrodite at Eryx. 



3 See my "Mycenaean Tree and Pillar-Cult" (J. H. .S., 1901), pp. 81, 83, and p. 79, 

 fig. 53. 



3 Op. cit., p. 78, fig. 52. 



