Before she was Athena of wisdom, she may have guarded a palace
The goddess behind the Parthenon probably began as a Bronze Age palace protector who watched over household crafts and the king. A single Linear B inscription at Knossos names a Lady of Athana. Over centuries she became the Greek patron of wisdom, war and handicraft, and the namesake of Athens.
Athena, often called Pallas, was later identified with the Roman Minerva and the Etruscan Menrva. She protected many Greek cities but above all Athens, where she was honoured as Polias, guardian of the city-state, and her temples usually stood on the fortified acropolis. Ancient writers argued over whether the goddess was named for the city or the city for her; modern scholars generally agree the goddess took her name from the place, whose plural form may refer to a sisterhood devoted to her.
Her birth is one of mythology's oddest. According to Hesiod, Zeus swallowed his pregnant consort Metis, and Athena later emerged from his forehead. Athens's founding story has her beating Poseidon for the city's patronage by producing the first olive tree. Ovid added tales such as her weaving contest with the mortal Arachne, whom she turned into the first spider.
Her origins are traced through several threads. The Knossos tablet appears in the earliest Linear B archive found anywhere. A Mycenaean fresco shows figures reaching toward a central figure hidden behind a huge figure-eight shield, perhaps the warrior goddess. Martin Nilsson and others argued she was once an owl or a bird goddess; one episode of the Odyssey shows her as a sea-eagle. Scholars broadly agree her cult keeps traces of a Proto-Indo-European goddess spanning several functions, and it may also have borrowed from armed Near Eastern goddesses such as Ishtar and Anat.
The Greeks themselves speculated about her name. Plato, in the Cratylus, linked it to divine mind, and the orator Aelius Aristides tried to read aether, air, earth and moon into it. Plato also reported that the people of Sais in Egypt worshipped Neith, a goddess of war, hunting and weaving, whom he equated with Athena.
Source: Athena
