Hi
Which Olympian gods and goddesses ( and demi-god offspring) are accepted as imports into Greek mythology?
Zeus, Athena and Hercules to name a few, are thought to be imports.
I look forward to your feedback.
Which Olympian gods and goddesses ( and demi-god offspring) are accepted as imports into Greek myth?
Lots of Roman Deities were imports.
Greek?
I dunno…
What do you mean by imports?
Where did you get the idea that Zeus was an import to Greek mythology?
ISTM an ‘import’ would be a documented or proved case of absorbing a foreign cult. So an old-school god like Zeus would not qualify. But it would be quite natural to identify certain foreign gods as Zeus or an aspect of Zeus; there were obviously many cults of Zeus, not just in Greece, and we might count some of those if they became Hellenistically popular.
From Wikipedia;
Zeus is just the first part of Dyaus Pita, a name which also morphed into Jupiter in Latin. The ancient Indo-European sky god probably morphed into lots of sky gods in Europe, although it is rarely as simple as that.
Certainly, many of the stories about Zeus were imports. That’s one of the reasons why he was so promiscuous: If in our land the sky-god is married to a sky-goddess, and in another land there is no sky-goddess but he’s married to the goddess of beauty, and in another land he’s married to the spring-goddess, and so on, well, who’s he really married to?
But when you’re identifying foreign gods as the same as your god, what does it even mean to say that the god himself is an import?
From Wikipedia :
“ Ganges was personified by the Greeks as a river god. Limaee was the Naiad-nymph of a lake in India and daughter of the river Ganges. She had a son named Athis.” - Ancient Greece–Ancient India relations - Wikipedia
“… Nysean, son of Zeus, who had left the tribes of the Indians and came to dwell at Thebes.”
I am no expert on this but Wikipedia has other examples.
I gotta ask – Cite?
I’ve never heard that any of these were “imports” in any sense of the word. Even Zeus’ various amours appear to be taking over stories within Greece itself. If you call THAT an “import”, then I think you have to define the pure raw situation you think these are being imported INTO. Athens? Sparta?
Many cases of alleged borrowing are inferred from cognate names. Apollo’s name is cognate to God(s) of the Hittites, Hurrians, and Luwians. Artemis was also the name of a Lydian Goddess. Of course the Hittites and Lydians were neighbors and linguistic cousins of the Greeks … (Some Roman God names seem to be cognate to Etruscan God names, but this is off-topic.)
Hermes is often associated with Egypt’s Thoth, but some such associations were invented after both Gods were already known.
Artemis was a ripoff of the Hittite-Hurrian godess Inara.
Zeus’ name is cognate with Sanskrit “Dyaus = Sky” (and Jupiter appears to be the same as “Dyaus Piter = Sky Father”), but I think the idea is that the original inhabitants brought the names with them when the immigrated into Greece. Is it “borrowing” if it was always yours, but you moved?
Yeah, but while the various city states grew to share a common culture, they started separately and politically remained separate states. I’d expect that they also started out with their own deities before their cultures more or less merged into what we now call the culture of ancient Greece.
(NB: I am not an historian nor an anthropologist of any sort. This is just my probably ill-informed opinion.)
Thanks Septimus. Can you elaborate on your last point about some associations being invented “after* both Gods were already known”. I’d appreciate it.
Tyr, for example.
The titans were likely imports. Oceanus and Tethys, especially.
Agreed – but they’re all still “Greek”. I assume thhat by “imported” he meant from outside Greece.
None of this is neat and clean. All cultures are constantly evolving. As are all mythologies.
But, at some point, historically, there was something that we can more-or-less accurately refer to as “ancient Greece” with some more-or-less common beliefs, such as beliefs about a god referred to as “Hermes” (but even then, the details would vary considerably from city-state to city-state, between cults within a given city-state, and even between individuals).
At some point, there was something we can more-or-less accurately refer to as “ancient Egypt”, etc., etc.
There’s no single identifiable point in time when the “ancient Greeks” and the “ancient Egyptians” came into direct cultural contact, but at some point they were trading and travelling and communicating, and becoming aware of more details about each other, including popular gods.
At some point in this process, a lot of Greeks and Egyptians noticed that their gods “Hermes” and “Thoth” had a lot of similarities. In the pan-Mediterranean, Hellenistic culture that arose in Antiquity, those two gods were explicitly identified by many Hellenistic thinkers as being different aspects of a single god, and “Thoth-Hermes” became a popular god in his own right, with worshippers all around the Hellenestic world. And, again, cultural evolution, although “Thoth-Hermes” was identified by intellectual rationalizers as the same god that their ancestors worshipped separately as “Thoth” or “Hermes”, the cult of “Thoth-Hermes” was in some ways quite distinct from its predecessors.
In that sense, “Thoth-Hermes” was an “import” into Greece.
Of course, humans have always been moving around, and trading, and communicating, so it’s always murky, and you can’t really draw any bright lines when “Hermes” and “Thoth” were definitely completely independent gods whose believers weren’t influencing each other. But, we do have actual ancient Greek writings explicitly identifying them as different aspects of the same god, which would at least imply that for many believers, they were at some point separate gods.
Dionysus is the single Olympian god that I see most often cited as an import. (Caveat: I am NOT an expert on this). As I understand it, of all of the Olympian gods, Dionysus has the best evidence as a deity that was “imported” into the Greek belief system as a wholly novel deity.
Other deities had certain myths or aspects or other bits folded into them by borrowing from other myth cycles, so that Poseidon the Sea-Lord had aspects of Poseidon Earth-Shaker and Poseidon Horse-Lord, who might have all at some point been distinct deities, folded into a single, rationalized deity. Or the way Thoth and Hermes were folded into a single syncretic deity, as noted above.
But Dionysus may have been truly distinct and novel when Greeks started worshipping him, without being incorported into any extant Greek deity.
Thank you gdave. Thank you all.Very helpful
Cybele was a mother goddess of very ancient pre-Indo-European origins in Anatolia who was eventually adopted by Greeks in Anatolia and whose cultus was imported to Rome in 204 BC.
Not a god, exactly, but the Sphinx was clearly an import from Egyptian mythology (although the Greeks added the riddles).