Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/39

 Presidential Address. 27

Again, while there is good ground for assuming tiiat the conception of an Earth goddess and a god of vegetation, sometimes her son, sometimes her fosterHng, or her lover, may have penetrated from Caria, and thence tiirough a Thracian-Phrygian medium, to Hellas, she probably gained vogue in these western lands because she was identified with some local deity of fertilit)'. Recent explorations by Messrs, Wace and Thompson ^^ indicate that, possibly owing to difference of race, the prehistoric culture of northern Greece was practically unaffected by the outburst of civil- isation in the Aegean area which we call Mycenaean ; and the belief, once widely held, that much of the religion and culture of ancient Greece was derived from Babylonia, in spite of her domination of western Asia during the 15th century B.C. must now, in the light of Mr. Farnell's recent examination of the question, be abandoned. In the records of early Greece no single Babylonian name is recognisable in its religious or mythological nomen- clature, and no characteristically Babylonian type of ritual is identifiable.^® As a matter of fact, the Hittite power in the second millennium formed a barrier between the Babylonian Empire and the coast-lands of Asia Minor.

If, then, we are to accept transmission of ideas through adjacent groups as an explanation of the growth of culture, we must endeavour to formulate some principles which may enable us to distinguish between what is alien and what is indigenous in each group. For the present we may accept the criteria laid down by Mr. Farnell in his discussion of the cult of Aphrodite, — the interpre- tation of the name ; the existence of the worship, and the traditional antiquity attributed to it, among those tribes whose seats were especially remote from foreign influence; its association with certain ritual and ideas

^* L. K. Farnell, Greece and Bahyloti, p. 307.
 * A. J. B. Wace and M. S. Thompson, r>-chish'ric '/ Jiessaly.