This volume is a catalog of the ancient Egyptian imports and Egyptianizing artifacts found in 1962 during the excavation of a cave near Tsoutsouros (ancient Inatos), Crete, Greece. The cave was a sanctuary dedicated to the Minoan and Greek goddess Eileithyia. The Aegyptiaca of the Minoan and Mycenaean eras on Crete signify the political and economic relations between the Aegean rulers and the Egyptian royal court. Several of the objects are Egyptian scarabs, and they certainly represent official Egyptian-Cretan affairs, especially those dating from the reign of Amenophis III to the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Much of the cataloged objects come from the 10th to 7th centuries B.C., and they are appropriate for venerating the goddess of childbirth and motherhood. The statuettes, seals, and vessels are lavishly illustrated with plates of color photographs.

Ancient Greek Beliefs explores the mysteries of the ancient myths and religious beliefs of a great people. The text is divided into three sections, Greek mythology, the ancient Greeks, and conclusions. A brief history and lengthy glossary are included. The book is designed as a basic text for the introduction to ancient Greek mythology and beliefs, and the text muses about the religious lessons we might learn from them. It contains abridged stories of Greek mythology, including the extant Greek plays, and considers portions of the works of the great writers, including Aeschylus, Euripides Hesiod, Homer, Plato, and Sophocles. It opens a comprehensive window into the lives of these great ancient people.

This text is presented in English and German. This book contains 19 articles dealing with various aspects of the Greek goddess Artemis and the Roman goddess Diana. The themes presented in the volume deal with the Near Eastern equivalents of Artemis, the Bronze Age Linear B testimonies, and Artemis in Homer and in the Greek tragedies. Sanctuaries and cult, and regional aspects are also dealt with - encompassing Cyprus, the Black Sea region, Greece and Italy. Pedimental sculpture, mosaics and sculpture form the basis of investigations of the iconography of the Roman Diana; the role of the cult of Diana in a dynastic setting is also examined. There is a single section that deals with the reception of the iconography of the Ephesian Artemis during the Renaissance and later periods.

The best-selling English translation of the mysterious and cosmic Greek poetry known as the Orphic Hymns. At the very beginnings of the Archaic Age, the great singer Orpheus taught a new religion that centered around the immortality of the human soul and its journey after death. He felt that achieving purity by avoiding meat and refraining from committing harm further promoted the pursuit of a peaceful life. Elements of the worship of Dionysus, such as shape-shifting and ritualistic ecstasy, were fused with Orphic beliefs to produce a powerful and illuminating new religion that found expression in the mystery cults. Practitioners of this new religion composed a great body of poetry, much of which is translated in The Orphic Hymns. The hymns presented in this book were anonymously composed somewhere in Asia Minor, most likely in the middle of the third century AD. At this turbulent time, the Hellenic past was fighting for its survival, while the new Christian faith was spreading everywhere. The Orphic Hymns thus reflect a pious spirituality in the form of traditional literary conventions. The hymns themselves are devoted to specific divinities as well as to cosmic elements. Prefaced with offerings, strings of epithets invoke the various attributes of the divinity and prayers ask for peace and health to the initiate. Apostolos N. Athanassakis and Benjamin M. Wolkow have produced an accurate and elegant translation accompanied by rich commentary.

It has often been thought that participation in fertility rituals was women's most important religious activity in classical Greece. Matthew Dillon's wide-ranging study makes it clear that women engaged in numerous other rites and cults, and that their role in Greek religion was actually more important than that of men. Women invoked the gods' help in becoming pregnant, venerated the god of wine, worshipped new and exotic deities, used magic for both erotic and pain-relieving purposes, and far more besides. Clear and comprehensive, this volume challenges many stereotypes of Greek women and offers unexpected insights into their experience of religion. With more than fifty illustrations, and translated extracts from contemporary texts, this is an essential resource for the study of women and religion in classical Greece.

In this groundbreaking work, Claude Calame argues that the songs sung by choruses of young girls in ancient Greek poetry are more than literary texts; rather, they functioned as initiatory rituals in Greek cult practices. Using semiotic and anthropologic theory, Calame reconstructs the religious and social institutions surrounding the songs, demonstrating their function in an aesthetic education that permitted the young girls to achieve the stature of womanhood and to be integrated into the adult civic community. This first English edition includes an updated bibliography.

The goddess Hera is represented in mythology as an irascible wife and imperfect mother in the face of a frivolous Zeus. Beginning with the Iliad, many narrative traditions depict her wrath, the infidelities of her royal husband and the persecutions to which she subjects his illegitimate offspring. But how to relate this image to the cults of the sovereign goddess in her sanctuaries across Greece? This book uses the Hera of Zeus to open up new perspectives for understanding the society of the gods, the fate of heroes and the lives of men. As the intimate enemy of Zeus but also the fierce guardian of the legitimacy and integrity of the Olympian family, she takes shape in more subtle and complex ways that make it possible to rethink the configuration of power in ancient Greece, with the tensions that inhabited it, and thus how polytheism works.