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A Third Near Eastern Theogony, and a Modern Invented One

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A Third Near Eastern Theogony, and a Modern Invented One

Article one's account of transmission into Hesiod rests mainly on the Hittite Song of Kumarbi. A further and independently attested Near Eastern theogony, closer to Greece in both language and geography, strengthens the same case rather than complicating it.

Philo of Byblos, writing in the first or second century CE and preserved only in excerpts quoted by the later Christian historian Eusebius, claimed to translate a Phoenician theogony older than Hesiod's, attributed to a certain Sanchuniathon, tracing divine generations through figures such as Elioun, Ouranos and El. Its reliability is debated, since it survives at several removes, but where it can be checked against genuinely ancient Ugaritic material recovered in the twentieth century, the divine names and some of the succession pattern correspond well enough that most specialists treat it as preserving real, if reworked, Phoenician tradition, adding a further transmission route between the Levant and Greek theogonic material alongside the Hittite one.

A different and much more recent case shows how easily a modern invention can be mistaken for surviving myth. Robert Graves's The White Goddess (1948) constructed an elaborate theogony of a suppressed pan-European matriarchal goddess religion displaced by patriarchal sky-gods, presented as scholarship but built on etymologies specialists in Celtic and classical material do not accept. It nonetheless shaped a great deal of later Wiccan and Goddess-movement theology, worth distinguishing sharply from Hesiod's or Philo's material: a modern literary theogony adopted as sacred history by a living movement, rather than an ancient text being interpreted.

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