Which tradition has a god of that?

How this is put together

Every entity page on this site carries a short list of what that figure governs, written from the ancient sources named on the page itself: Zeus has the sky, thunder, kingship, oaths and hospitality; Utu has justice, the sun and legal judgement. Those lists are written for the pages, not for this tool. The grid groups the 667 entries by matching those lists against 29 broad offices, and shows you the figure’s own wording next to their name so you can see exactly why they turned up.

It reads domains only, and deliberately not iconography. An earlier version matched attributes in art as well, and promptly filed Artemis under the moon on the strength of the crescent in her imagery — which is precisely the late, mostly Roman-era identification the Artemis page spends three paragraphs separating from the classical goddess. A tool that quietly re-imports the confusion the articles exist to clear up is worse than no tool.

How to read the comparison

Tap two names and the panel underneath computes three separate things, which are kept apart on purpose because they are three different kinds of claim. The percentage is arithmetic on this site’s own records: the spheres both figures are recorded as holding, over everything either of them holds. It is a measure of how much this encyclopedia says they overlap, and nothing more — two gods can share seven domains and have no historical relationship of any kind, which is the finding the Zeus and Odin comparison spends two thousand words establishing.

The second thing is whether an ancient writer actually equated them, and where. That is a fact about a named person on a datable occasion: Tacitus calling Odin Mercury tells you what a Roman senator in 98 CE reached for when he had no German vocabulary, and it is evidence about Tacitus before it is evidence about Odin. The third is whether the pair carries a famous equation somebody invented — Ishtar and Easter, the Morrígan and Morgan le Fay — in which case the panel names the book it came from and the year. A reader who can tell those three apart can read almost any mythology writing safely, and a reader who cannot is at the mercy of whoever writes most confidently.

Empty columns are results

When a tradition does not appear under an office, that is information rather than a gap in the site. There is no Celtic creation account in the surviving Irish or Welsh material — the Lebor Gabála Érenn is a Christian pseudo-history of invasions, not a cosmogony. There is no god of the sea in the Egyptian material the way there is in the Greek, because the river, not the Mediterranean, was the water that mattered. These absences are stated on the pages, and this tool repeats them instead of promoting the nearest available substitute.

Where to take it next

Every name links to the full written portrait: the sources it rests on, the versions that conflict, the cult sites, and the modern retellings kept in their own section. The written comparisons take the notable pairings one at a time with room to argue. To follow a figure through their family instead, use the relationship explorer; to work out who a half-remembered figure is, the identifier; and for when each tradition’s evidence was actually written down, the source timeline.