d by Mohammed and expanded (probably under the
influence of some advanced Arabian circle of thinkers of his time) into
the conception of the one only god, which he and others had derived from
Christians and Jews. In certain parts of the Old Testament also "Elohim"
stands for the national god, conceived of as all-sufficient. But these
are late conceptions. There is no proof that in South Arabia or in
Babylonia the term Ilu meant anything else than the local deity, though
such a deity would naturally receive all the attributes that his
worshipers demanded in their religious constructions. Most of the
appellations of Semitic deities are epithets, and while this mode of
conceiving of the gods militated against the development of them into
distinct personalities and the construction of a pantheon, it was
favorable, on the other hand, to isolation and to the tendency to
elevate any favorite deity to a position of preeminence.

+767+. _Greece._ The Greeks, with their rich imagination and artistic
feeling, filled the world with divine figures, well-defined types of
Greek character, ideals of Greek thought. Greece alone has constructed a
true pantheon, a community of gods all individualized, but all compacted
into a family or a body of government. The question of their historical
development involves great difficulties, partly because the wide
diffusion of their cults in Hellas occasioned many local expansions of
the original conceptions in the various regions, partly because most of
the deities appear fully or almost fully formed in the earliest literary
monuments, so that we are dependent on cultic procedures and passing
allusions for a knowledge of their preliterary character. Without, then,
attempting an investigation of the obscure prehistoric theogonic period,
the general lines of growth of some of the principal divine personages
may be followed (as far as the data permit) as examples of the way in
which the great gods were gradually created.[1319]

+768+. Zeus, originally doubtless a sky-god (not the sun), represents
an old Indo-European divine conception, found substantially also among
all the great peoples of antiquity, as well as in many half-civilized
tribes. But nowhere has he attained so eminent a position as in Greece.
The Hindu Dyaus (the 'shining one')[1320] is not prominent in the Vedic
mythology or in later times, and the Mazdean Ahura Mazda, if he was
originally the sky, had dropped his physical characteristic