below two others which represented the breasts. At times she was furnished with wings on either side, but this seems to have been a comparatively late modification.
A leaden image of this goddess, exactly modelled after her form in archaic Babylonian and Hittite art, and adorned with the swastika (卍), has been found by Dr. Schliemann among the ruins of Ilion, that is to say, the second of the prehistoric cities on the mound of Hissarlik (see Ilios, fig. 226). Precisely the same figure, with ringlets on either side of the head, but with the pelvis ornamented with dots instead of with the swastika (), is sculptured on a piece of serpentine, recently found in Maeonia and published by M. Salomon Reinach in the Revue archéologique. Here by the side of the goddess stands the Babylonian Bel, and among the Babylonian symbols that surround them is the representation of one of the very terra-cotta "whorls" of which Dr. Schliemann has found such multitudes at Troy. No better proof could be desired of the truth of his hypothesis, which sees in them votive offerings to the supreme goddess of Ilion. Mr. Ramsay has procured a similar "whorl" from Kaisarieh in Kappadokia, along with clay tablets inscribed in the undeciphered Kappadokian cuneiform. Até, as Dr. Schliemann has pointed out in Ilios, was the native name of the Trojan goddess whom the Greeks identified with their Athéna, and 'Athi was also the name of the great goddess of Carchemish.[1]
The "owl-headed" vases, again, exhibit under a slightly varying form the likeness of the same deity. The owl-like face is common in the representations of the goddess upon the cylinders of primitive Chaldea, as well as the three protuberances below it which are arranged in the shape of an inverted triangle, while the wings which distinguish the vases find their parallel, not only on the engraved stones of Babylonia, but also in the extended arms
- ↑ See my Paper on "The Monuments of the Hittites" in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, VII. 2, p. 259.
