Zeus and Foreign Gods
Zeus was identified with the Roman god Jupiter and associated in the syncretic classical imagination (see interpretatio graeca) with various other deities, such as the Egyptian Ammon and the Etruscan Tinia. He, along with Dionysus, absorbed the role of the chief Phrygian god Sabazios in the syncretic deity known in Rome as Sabazius. The Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes erected a statue of Zeus Olympios in the Judean Temple in Jerusalem. Hellenizing Jews referred to this statue as Baal Shamen (in English, Lord of Heaven).
Some modern comparative mythologists align him with the Hindu Indra.
Read more about this topic: Kasios
Famous quotes containing the words zeus and, zeus, foreign and/or gods:
“The squabbles of philandering Zeus and shrewish Hera are the Greeks’ comment on married life.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Zeus is the air, Zeus the earth, Zeus all things and what transcends them all.”
—Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.)
“The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)
“These, and such as these, must be our antiquities, for lack of human vestiges. The monuments of heroes and the temples of the gods which may once have stood on the banks of this river are now, at any rate, returned to dust and primitive soil. The murmur of unchronicled nations has died away along these shores, and once more Lowell and Manchester are on the trail of the Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)