of divine personalities. A complex case is the Greek god
Zeus. Linguistic and functional analysis has shown that Zeus
has homologues outside Greece, in various other Indo-
European religious cultures; whatever the exact mechanisms
of the diffusion of Indo-European speakers were, Zeus’s
Indo-European ancestry is well established. The way in
which Greek Zeus appeared in poetry and in the cults and
images between 700 BCE and 400 BCE is considerably more
complex. He presides over the present cosmic order in a suc-
cession of rulers since the beginning of cosmogony and the-
ogony. In a story that depends on several Near Eastern suc-
cession myths, he fought a battle of wits with Prometheus,
a member of the earlier generation of gods and protector of
humans whose stories were influenced by those of Mesopota-
mian Ea/Enki. In order to secure his power, he fought a
monster with snake features: this resonates with several Near
Eastern foundation myths; the later story of how he was at-
tacked and temporarily defeated by Typhon is connected
with the Syrian Mount Kasios, where Baal Zaphon was wor-
shiped. Like many Semitic Baalim and Anatolian weather
gods, Zeus was the god of rain, storms, and lightning whose
preferred place of worship was mountaintops. Thus, a con-
siderable number of Near Eastern stories helped to shape the
early Greek myths of Zeus, as Near Eastern mountain cults
shaped the cult of Zeus on mountaintops. The transfer
mechanism of stories is clear: through direct or indirect con-
tact, a Near Eastern story was adapted and reshaped by an
early Greek singer; the reshaping was conditioned by the
singer’s creativity, the specific circumstances of his perfor-
mance, and the expectations of the audience. The mecha-
nism of cult transfer is less clear, but presumably some of the
stories in turn created cults. Furthermore, most early Greek
communities worshiped Zeus, and their local stories legiti-
mated and explained their cults. These local stories and cults
interacted with those of their neighbors; the stories were
sometimes picked up by itinerant singers and incorporated
into their narrative. Early Greek images of Zeus in the shape
of a walking god brandishing a thunderbolt resonated with
Syrian or Anatolian images of local Baalim and with Egyp-
tian monumental statues. In an inverse movement, gods in
other language areas were read as Zeus: Baalim in Syria; local
weather gods in Anatolia, who in Greek inscriptions ap-
peared as Zeus, often with the local name as an epithet; Tinia
in Etruria; Jupiter in Rome.
This narration assumes several processes of interaction
to have taken place and several categories of agents to have
been consciously or unconsciously active: the transfer of nar-
rations from the ancient Near East to Greece, from Asian sto-
rytellers, scribes, priests, and ordinary people telling stories
to Greek merchants, travelers and, finally, itinerant singers
who diffused them to Greek audiences; the transfer of local
Greek stories from one place to another by singers who made
it part of their repertoire; the foundation of specific cults or
the change of local rituals through the agency either of a sing-
er’s tale or a neighbor’s cult; the manufacturing of images by
Greek craftsmen after images seen by travelers and merchants
in the East or dedicated in a Greek sanctuary by Greek and
Eastern merchants, travelers, and religious specialists; the
identifications of a local god with Zeus by travelers such as
Herodotus who wanted to understand and explain to their
audience a foreign god by translating his name, by Greek set-
tlers who wanted to worship a local god under a name they
knew, by members of local elites in Anatolia, Etruria, and
Rome who intended to enhance the prestige of their cult by
adding stories and images from Greece, or by local craftsmen
looking for pictorial traditions that they lacked in their local
setting. These agents and interactions created the traditions
of local and Panhellenic storytelling, iconography, and cult.Using the language of syncretism, one would have to
speak of two basic forms of syncretism, external and internal,
between systems and within a system. But to do this would
mean to drastically simplify the description of the various
processes and thus to lose a rich heuristic and descriptive ar-
senal; it seems better to create new and more specific terms
than to redefine syncretism to include just one type of process.More problems arise when we try to define the bounda-
ries of the systems: do we have to respect the boundaries set
by the locals, or do we impose them from our point of view,
and if so, what are the criteria used? The boundaries that
Greeks themselves defined were shifting over the period we
focused on, from the city (polis) to the tribe, to all Greeks
as a unit; the shifts resulted from political developments in-
side Greece. Modern definitions of boundaries usually follow
language or political structure, thus replicating the model of
the modern nation-state: Greek religion as an autonomous
entity was the religion of the people who spoke Greek or of
the territory over which Greeks ruled; this expanded the sys-
tem when, as a consequence of Alexander’s conquests, Greek
became the language of the entire Eastern Mediterranean
world, whereas it would collapse when the Romans took
over. More recently, scholars resignedly accepted the polis as
the basic unit of religion and ended up with a vast plurality
of Greek religions. This verges towards a reductio ad ab-
surdum: any religious contact between two cities could be
called syncretism.CONCLUSIONS. Syncretism was heavily discussed in the
1970s and 1980s; then, the debate slowed down. Colpe’s
hope that scholars could agree on one meaning proved un-
founded; and since the term still has its polemical meaning
in present-day church language, it is unlikely that such an
agreement is imminent. In this situation it might be more
useful not to use the term at all, even though no replacement
is in sight. As hybridity with its origin in the discourse of co-
lonial history suggests, the underlying problems of cultural
identity and autonomy are too sensitive to lend themselves
to neutral descriptions and formalizations; it is likely that the
coexistence of several scholarly communities with their own
terminology will persist for some time.SYNCRETISM [FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS] 8937