e 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,