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Asianic Elements in Greek Civilisation.
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THE MOON-GODDESS IN ANATOLIA
FIG. 8.
Sun-god, Moon-goddess, and Cybele, Chap. xx.
THREE reliefs were drawn at Zemme on the imperial estate of the Prepennisseis in 1884 by Lady Ramsay, and are here reproduced. They occupied three sides of an altar, and on such an estate the subjects are peculiarly instructive, for the imperial agriculturists were not encouraged, and were hardly allowed to grow in civilisation. The Emperor was their lord, and they were almost his serfs. This unhealthy state of the peasants on the vast imperial estates was one of the causes that produced the degeneration of the Roman Empire.
On one side the relief represents evidently the moon-goddess. The crescent moon occupies most of her body, and there is also a hint of the ova of the Ephesian goddess; she is a complex personality. On her head is a horned cap, resembling in some degree an ox-head in the ordinary conventional form.
At the Phrygian city of Pisidian Antioch Men was the great god. He seems to monopolise all the attributes of both god and goddess. In the excavations at the Sanctuary only the scantiest traces of the goddess were found. Antioch was refounded as a Greek garrison city and a Roman military colony, to guard against the attacks of Pisidians and Homanadeissians, and the male divinity was worshipped almost to the exclusion of the female by the soldiery. Moreover, distinctions of sex in the divine nature were little regarded (see also p. 276). Hence he is apt to be
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regarded as the Moon god, and he always wears the crescent over his shoulders, and puts his foot on the bull’s head.
Yet I believe he was originally the Hittite or Anatolian Masnes, whose name became Mannes, Manes, and in Greek Men; and that originally wings stood out from his shoulders, not the horns of the crescent moon.
On the opposite side is a much-defaced relief of a radiated head and bust, obviously the sun-god; the details are too uncertain to afford ground for reasoning.1
In the central face (opposite to that which contained the inscription) is a bust of the Mother-goddess with lofty head-dress and veil hanging lightly to her shoulders. She is slightly smaller than the other two figures; the supreme power apparently bulked less in the life of the people than the more active subordinate powers. Activity was no proof of superior rank in Asia. Hermes, the messenger god and the chief speaker, was the subordinate power to Zeus in the Isaurian and Lycaonian country.
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Footnotes
1 Luke xiii. 20.
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