Though I am very much less confident about specifying the beginnings of the
Artemis and
Apollo cults of the western half of
Asia Minor, it is clear that worship there
had a somewhat different blend of constituent elements in its substrata from those of the "Helladic" (viz, Greek Peninsula) substrata. But the word "influence" is especially comical here. The Neolithic and
Bronze Age (pre-Late Mycenaean) equivalent to the internet was the Boat. True, with increasing population and increasing trade (with more knowledge of where and how to go), interchanges of words, technololgies, raw materials (think of
emery and copper, just to name two), and eventually colonies, the intricate complex of interchanges grew and grew, until by the Late
Bronze Age the rich miscegenation of culture became so complexly entangled that people, always inclined to the sin of fear, started systematically trying (in their folklore and cults) to define themselves as against each other--always laughable and asinine, even when it doesn't lead to slaughter.
The Greek peninsular
Zeus and the Cretan
Zeus and the Western Anatolian
Zeus (not to mention the cognate names in Sanskrit and Latin) are not different gods, really, only culturally (literarily) differentiable--you might almost call them avatars, not of 'one god' but of different assortments of attributes of a single god complex. Yes, and toss in Thor as well.
As for
Artemis, you can hardly isolate the virginal girl huntess who slays Aktaion from the mistress of wild beasts idea which is more dominant at
Ephesos.
Yes, there is a sub-Hittite component more dominant in
Asia Minor, where it is more primary, but the
Hittites themselves, as their language demonstrates, were as perfect an example of miscegenation as the various peninsular
Greeks. As you can see, I don't think much genetic or cultural purity is to be found in thriving populations and their cultures. And that's not some mushy pseudo-liberal notion. Far from it. It is accumulated evidence.
Pat L.
Someone mentioned the breasts/eggs/bull testicles adorning the images of Ephesian
Artemis. I always have wondered how early these were added. All the images that we have with them, known to me, are post-Classical, not merely post-original. Things like that can just get started in cults. I wonder if anyone can document an answer to this question. A classical Greek author might call an early image ugly or
barbaric either with reference to its unlikeness to a lovely woman or as to its unaccustomed attributes. Above, someone used the word 'plank'. OK,
wood. But what is the Greek word that 'plank' translates?