40 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS 



"Astarte were equally vile, though accompanied by the cooing of 

 "doves and clouds of incense." 



But going hand in hand with this base ritual, there were in the 

 Hittite faith elements of the old nature worship of Armenia and of 

 Asia Minor. Hence the wild dances, the mystic wanderings through 

 the woods, the clanging of cymbal and of tambourine. Conder 

 shows that the general character of the religion of the Turanian 

 tribes, of which he supposes the Hittites to be one, is in its main 

 features like that of the Hottentots. Indeed the Hittites grafted the 

 Babylonian and Egyptian ideas on the animism of the Turanian — 

 the invocation of mountain, river, cloud and storm, and the more 

 abstract ideas of Babylonia and of Egypt were mixed, and thus grew 

 up a system that gave to Greece ideas and forms familiar to the 

 students of Greek and Roman literature. 



