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59 Herodotus (and other Greek classical historians) that the Greeks had borrowed their theogony from the Egyptians. Aegipan stood for the African Ram God of Egypt, and Hermes paralleled the god Thoth. Hesiod himself reported that when Zeus came unto the mor- tal beauty Alcmena so that she might bear him the heroic Heracles, he slipped at night from Mount Olympus and went to the land of Typhaonion, resting there atop the Phikion (The Sphinx Mountain). "The deadly Sphinx that destroyed the Cadmeans" ("The Ancients"), which featured in the doings of Hera, the offi- cial spouse of Zeus, was also connected in these legends with Ty- phon and his domain. And Apollodorus reported that when Typhon was born and grew to an incredible size, the gods rushed to Egypt to take a look at the awesome monster. Most scholars have held that Mount Casius, the site of the final battle between Zeus and Typhon, was located near the mouth of the Orontes river in today's Syria. But as Otto Eissfeldt has shown in a major study (Baal Zaphon, Zeus Kasios und der Durchgang der Israelilen durches Meer), there was another mount called by that name in antiquity—a promontory on the Serbonic Sealet that juts out of the Sinai peninsula into the Mediterranean Sea. He sug- gested that that was the mount referred to in the legends. Once again, all one had to do was to trust the information given to Herodotus in Egypt. Describing the land route from Phoenicia to Egypt via Philistia (History, Book I, 5), he wrote that the Asian lands ' ‘extend to Lake Serbonis, near the place where Mount Casius juts out into the sea. Egypt begins at Lake Serbonis, where the tale goes that Typhon hid himself." Once again, Greek and Egyptian tales converged, with the Sinai peninsula as the climax. Notwithstanding the many connecting threads the ancient Greeks had found between their theogony and that of Egypt, it was much farther away—in India—that nineteenth-century European _ scholars have found even more amazing parallels. No sooner had Sanskrit, the language of ancient India, been mastered at the end of the eighteenth century than Europe began to be enchanted by translations of hitherto unknown writings. At first a field dominated by the British, the study of Sanskrit literature, philosophy, and mythology was by the mid-nineteenth century a favorite of German scholars, poets, and intellectuals, for Sanskrit turned out to be a mother tongue of the Indo-European languages (to which German belonged), and its bearers to India were mi- The Missiles of Zeus and Indra