It used to be customary to account for the similarities manifested by the various mother goddesses by assuming that there was constant cultural contact between separate nationalities, and, as a result, a not inconsiderable amount of “religious borrowing”.  Greece was supposed to have received its great goddesses from the western Semites, who had come under the spell of Babylonian religion.  Archaeological evidence, however, tends to disprove this theory.  “The most recent researches into Mesopotamian history”, writes Dr. Farnell, “establish with certainty the conclusion that there was no direct political contact possible between the powers in the valley of the Euphrates and the western shores of the Aegean in the second millennium B.C.  In fact, between the nascent Hellas and the great world of Mesopotamia there were powerful and possibly independent strata of cultures interposing."[137]

The real connection appears to be the racial one.  Among the Mediterranean Neolithic tribes of Sumeria, Arabia, and Europe, the goddess cult appears to have been influential.  Mother worship was the predominant characteristic of their religious systems, so that the Greek goddesses were probably of pre-Hellenic origin, the Celtic of Iberian, the Egyptian of proto-Egyptian, and the Babylonian of Sumerian.  The northern hillmen, on the other hand, who may be identified with the “Aryans” of the philologists, were father worshippers.  The Vedic Aryo-Indians worshipped father gods,[138] as did also the Germanic peoples and certain tribes in the “Hittite confederacy”.  Earth spirits were males, like the Teutonic elves, the Aryo-Indian Ribhus, and the Burkans, “masters”, of the present-day Buriats, a Mongolian people.  When the father-worshipping peoples invaded the dominions of the mother-worshipping peoples, they introduced their strongly individualized gods, but they did not displace the mother goddesses.  “The Aryan Hellenes”, says Dr. Farnell, “were able to plant their Zeus and Poseidon on the high hill of Athens, but not to overthrow the supremacy of Athena in the central shrine and in the aboriginal soul of the Athenian people."[139] As in Egypt, the beliefs of the father worshippers, represented by the self-created Ptah, were fused with the beliefs of the mother worshippers, who adored Isis, Mut, Neith, and others.  In Babylonia this process of racial and religious fusion was well advanced before the dawn of history.  Ea, who had already assumed manifold forms, may have originally been the son or child lover of Damkina, “Lady of the Deep”, as was Tammuz of Ishtar.  As the fish, Ea was the offspring of the mother river.