of Laban, thy mother’s brother."[290] From these quotations two obvious deductions may be drawn:  the Hebrews regarded the Hittites “of the land” as one with the Canaanites, the stocks having probably been so well fused, and the worried Rebekah had the choosing of Jacob’s wife or wives from among her own relations in Mesopotamia who were of Sumerian stock and kindred of Abraham.[291] It is not surprising to find traces of Sumerian pride among the descendants of the evicted citizens of ancient Ur, especially when brought into association with the pretentious Hittites.

Evidence of racial blending in Asia Minor is also afforded by Hittite mythology.  In the fertile agricultural valleys and round the shores of that great Eur-Asian “land bridge” the indigenous stock was also of the Mediterranean race, as Sergi and other ethnologists have demonstrated.  The Great Mother goddess was worshipped from the earliest times, and she bore various local names.  At Comana in Pontus she was known to the Greeks as Ma, a name which may have been as old as that of the Sumerian Mama (the creatrix), or Mamitu^m (goddess of destiny); in Armenia she was Anaitis; in Cilicia she was Ate (’Atheh of Tarsus); while in Phrygia she was best known as Cybele, mother of Attis, who links with Ishtar as mother and wife of Tammuz, Aphrodite as mother and wife of Adonis, and Isis as mother and wife of Osiris.  The Great Mother was in Phoenicia called Astarte; she was a form of Ishtar, and identical with the Biblical Ashtoreth.  In the Syrian city of Hierapolis she bore the name of Atargatis, which Meyer, with whom Frazer agrees, considers to be the Greek rendering of the Aramaic ’Athar-’Atheh—­the god ’Athar and the goddess ’Atheh.  Like the “bearded Aphrodite”, Atargatis may have been regarded as a bisexual deity.  Some of the specialized mother goddesses, whose outstanding attributes reflected the history and politics of the states they represented, were imported into Egypt—­the land of ancient mother deities—­during the Empire period, by the half-foreign Rameses kings; these included the voluptuous Kadesh and the warlike Anthat.  In every district colonized by the early representatives of the Mediterranean race, the goddess cult came into prominence, and the gods and the people were reputed to be descendants of the great Creatrix.  This rule obtained as far distant as Ireland, where the Danann folk and the Danann gods were the children of the goddess Danu.

Among the Hatti proper—­that is, the broad-headed military aristocracy—­the chief deity of the pantheon was the Great Father, the creator, “the lord of Heaven”, the Baal.  As Sutekh, Tarku, Adad, or Ramman, he was the god of thunder, rain, fertility, and war, and he ultimately acquired solar attributes.  A famous rock sculpture at Boghaz-Koei depicts a mythological scene which is believed to represent the Spring marriage of the Great Father and the Great Mother, suggesting a local fusion of beliefs which resulted from the union of tribes of the god cult