Marble statue of the goddess Isis, identified with the Greek Persephone (II century A.D.), from Gortyna, on the Island of Crete, and now in the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion, Greece. The Greeks have undertaken an interpretatio graeca of the Egyptian pantheon, an example of which is found in Herodotus’ work. But it is only with the Ptolemaic period that the cult of Isis had a genuine diffusion outside Egypt: Greek colonists identified Isis with Demeter (Herodotus, II, 59), as mother goddess and dispenser of fecundity, or with her daughter Persephone (Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, 27). Isis’s iconography changed too: the long and tight tunic is substituted by the Greek chiton and the Egyptian hairdressing leave the place to long hair locks, while some of her attributes remain, such as the sistrum she holds in her hand and the solar disk framed by horns that decorates her head (Takács 2005).
The assimilation of Isis with Demeter and Persephone, the main characters of the Eleusinian Mysteries, produced a development of the goddess’s worship in the shape of a mystery cult. At the end of the II century A.D., this cult diffused in Italy, where it became very popular, thanks to the qualities of divine mother and guardian of love attributed to the goddess. Temples of Isis (Isea) are found in many parts of Italy: the most well-known of them is probably that of Pompeii, preserved by the Vesuvius eruption. A temple of Isis was located in the nearby of Turin, in the ancient city of Industria, in the modern territory of Monteu da Po, where numerous bronze statuettes of the goddess have been found, and are now in the Antiquity Museum (Museo di Antichità), Turin, Italy. The cult of Isis extinguished in the IV century A.D., in correspondence with the advance of Christianity.

[Image: http://www.hellenicaworld.com/Greece/Minoan/en/AMI0009.html]