For every mound excavated in the Near East, a hundred remain untouched. ...most of the excavated mounds have been dug only in small part. - Cyrus Herzl Gordon

If the entire aristocracy is of divine descent, Zeus (or El) cannot save the human son without upsetting the order of things. ...Hera reminds Zeus that many sons of gods are fighting around Troy, and that if Zeus spares his son, other gods will do the same for their sons, so that the earthly system will cease (Iliad 16: 445-449)

Homeric tradition has its own way of telling us that Minoan/Mycenaean civilisation was intertwined with the culture of the Semitic Phoenicians. Iliad 14: 321-322 makes Phoenix (named after the ancestor of the Phoenicians) the maternal grandfather of Minos. ...Archaeology bears out early cultural connections between the two.

Despite the polytheism of the East Mediterranean nations, monotheistic trends were always present even in such crass polytheisms such as we find in Homer and in Egyptian literature.