The Religion of Greece in Prehistoric Times. The Sather Lectures, XVII. By Axel W. Persson. Pp. 189; pl. 11 + 29 text figs. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, and Cambridge University Press, 1942. 12s.

Dr. Persson's account of prehistoric Greek religion is based upon precise observation of his archaeological material and general inference from cults in the nearer ‘Afrasian’ countries. There is also a chapter on its survivals in classical Greek religion and another on comparisons with that of the Nordic Bronze Age. His archaeological evidence consists mainly of twenty-eight engraved signetrings from Crete and the Greek Mainland, rather more than have hitherto been counted among religious documents ; their subjects are excellently reproduced in enlarged photographs and are very fully, ingeniously and plausibly described. A twenty-ninth illustration shows the elaborate design of the ‘Ring of Minos’ convincingly analysed into three subjects which have been copied with inadequate knowledge from other rings. The ‘Ring of Nestor’ and those of the ‘Thisbe Treasure’ are more discreetly bypassed. Dr. Persson's conclusion is that Minoan–Mycenaean religion as shown in the pictorial series of the signets, even in the bull-fighting scenes, was principally concerned with the annual vegetation cycle, in which human death and burial were involved. He finds here a single goddess and a young god whom he identifies or compares with the divine consorts of fertility cults in Asia Minor, Syria, Babylonia and Egypt. The multiplicity of deities apparently persisting from prehistoric times, in later Greek cult and mythology, is reasonably explained by the adoption of invocatory epithets as proper names, partly through the ignorance of the Hellenic population, partly through their inclination towards definite ideas and persons in religion.