Questions about Greek influences

[Koen G]

David - It's an Egyptian deity, Isis in her snake form. I was a bit upset because it turned up in the "mythological foldout", which, I thought, only draws from either:

- Hellenistic imagery 
- Stories from Ovid's Metamorphoses. 

The thing is - I'm a bit obsessed with this foldout and I know its every line by heart (slight exaggeration). When by pure coincidence I come across an image of the type that inspired it, I recognize it immediately, as if it slaps me in the face.

I mean, look at the root of that plant - it's a cobra. I had seen that already. But if it's a cobra, it's got something weird on its head, and I had no idea what it was supposed to depict. Now it appears that there is a cobra deity with a typical hat that follows every line of that plant!



Now, interestingly, this deity (the unfortunately named Isis) was readily adopted in later Greco-Roman culture - as Isis Fortuna by the Romans and Tyche by the Greeks. She retained the hat in human form:



Now, where it gets really cool, since I've been talking about hybrid cultural elements a lot today - is that in Egypt, the Greco-Roman deity was also depicted in snake form:

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Now, this will surely seem like random association to most people, but actually this is a really good example of an emblematic mnemonic. The cobra and the hat must have been recognized far and wide around the Mediterranean.