Even in the petty and limited territory of Attica, each tribe, independent of the public worship, had its peculiar deities, honoured by peculiar rites.
The deity said to be introduced by Cecrops is Neith, or more properly Naith [28]--the goddess of Sais, in whom we are told to recognise the Athene, or Minerva of the Greeks.

I pass over as palpably absurd any analogy of names by which the letters that compose the word Keith are inverted to the word Athene.

The identity of the two goddesses must rest upon far stronger proof.

But, in order to obtain this proof, we must know with some precision the nature and attributes of the divinity of Sais--a problem which no learning appears to me satisfactorily to have solved.

It would be a strong, and, I think, a convincing argument, that Athene is of foreign origin, could we be certain that her attributes, so eminently intellectual, so thoroughly out of harmony with the barbarism of the early Greeks, were accorded to her at the commencement of her worship.