Cook, Arthur B.: Zeus: a study in ancient religion (Band 2,1): Zeus god of the dark sky (thunder and lightning): Text and notes (Cambridge, 1925)

The double axes of Tenedos 663

' Minoan ' objects have in fact come to light in Tenedos (fig. 602)1
and suggest that here in early days was a
' Minoan' settlement. The settlers called
themselves Asterioi2and doubtless discovered
with joy that at Asterion in their island were
river-crabs marked with a double axe3. The
curious combination of crab and double axe
recalls the joint cult of Zeus Osogda and Zeus
Labrdyndos at Mylasa4. The circumstances,
however, though similar, are not identical.
In Karia a local deity, whose attribute was
the crab, having been Hellenised into a Zeus of the sea, was fused
with a Zeus of the sky, inheritor of the ancient ' Minoan' double
axe, the resultant god being known to the Greeks as Zenoposeidon.
In Tenedos too we are concerned with the legacy of the double
axe. But here, in the Thraco-Phrygian area, the principal sky-god
was Dios, who was worshipped in twofold form as Father and Son
—Zeus and Dionysos, said the Greeks'. It matters little, therefore,
whether we assert that among the Tenedians the ' Minoan' axe
passed into the hands of a Dionysiac Zeus or into those of a Zeus-
like Dionysos. Not improbably the former developed into the
latter, stress beingr laid first on the older and afterwards on the
younger aspect of the god. But in either case we mean him who
was at once the husband and the son of Semele. His effigy and
hers are combined as the Thraco-Phrygian equivalent of the
'Minoan' Kronos and Rhea. What then of the crabs? Presumably
in Tenedos, as in Karia, they belonged to some local deity identified
with Zeus.

Confirmation-is not far to seek. Thirty miles or so to the west
of Tenedos lies Lemnos, a great centre of Cabiric cultfi. Cor-

discern in the new dawn [sc. of classical Greece] are not the pale-skinned northerners—
the " yellow-haired Achaeans " and the rest—but essentially the dark-haired, brown-
complexioned race, the $oiVt/ces or " Red Men " of later tradition, of whom we find the
earlier portraiture in the Minoan and Mycenaean wall paintings.'

1 I figure a coarsely-cut lenticular seal-stone, which I acquired in Athens in 1901.
Material: haematite. Scale: y. Alleged provenance: Tenedos.

- Supra i. 543 n. 6. •

3 jn-fra p. 669 n. 5. Mr L. A. Borradaile, Lecturer in Zoology to the University of
Cambridge, informs me that the crabs in question probably belonged to the species
Telphusa Jluviatilis, the marking of whose back might be held to resemble the head of
a double axe. He kindly refers me to Miss M. J. Rathbun ' Les crabes d'eau douce' in
the Nouvelles Archives du Museum d'Histoire Naturelle Quatrieme Serie Paris 1904
pp. 254—258 pi. 9, 1 and 5.

4 Supra p. 576 ff. 5 Supra p. 277 ff.

8 L. Blbch in Roscher Lex. Myth. ii. 2523 ff., O. Kern in Pauly—Wissowa Real-Enc.
x. 1420 ff.