Many aspects of the mythographical literature relating to Beotian Thebes, its foundation, its religious and heroical nomenclature, the presence of ritual practises and conceptions otherwise unknown in genuine Greek culture (as, for instance, death danger of seeing God, children sacrifices, litholatry) point out the possibility of a Near Eastern component at the origins of the town. Behind the tale of the "phenician" Kadmos (sem. "the primordial Man") could have been the arrival of immigrates from Canaan towards the middle of second millennium, who later mixed with local residents.
