Temples and images are unknown to the Avesta. The reform preserved for the nations of Iran the traditional form of worship without images, on which it was founded. The accounts of western writers, from Herodotus and Xenophon downwards, establish the fact that there were only sacrificial places on the heights and consecrated fire-altars in Iran.[283] But this must not be taken to mean that the forms of worship and the images of the nations with which the Persians became acquainted after the foundation of their supremacy, especially of their nearest neighbours, the Semites on the Tigris and Euphrates, remained without influence on them. On the monuments of Darius we see the picture of Auramazda, cut exactly after the pattern which the Assyrian monuments exhibit in the portraiture of their god Asshur. We are also told of images of Anahita. Berosus maintains that Artaxerxes Mnemon erected statues to Aphrodite Anaitis at Babylon, Ecbatana, and Susa, and taught this form of worship to the Damascenes and Lydians.[284] From this statement, taken in connection with the account of Herodotus that the Persians had learnt to sacrifice to Mylitta,[285] the conclusion has been drawn that Artaxerxes II. introduced the worship of Bilit among the Persians. But it was not necessary to teach this worship to the Damascenes and Lydians (I. 358, 563), and even in the Avesta, Anahita as the goddess of the heavenly water is the goddess of fertility. Hence the statues made by Artaxerxes were, no doubt, images of Anahita the goddess, whom he invokes along with Auramazda and Mithra in his inscription at Susa. Strabo describes the worship of the Magians at the fire-altars of Cappadocia in a manner which completely agrees with the accounts given in the Avesta, and then adds that these functions were also performed in the enclosures ([Greek: sêkoi]) which were consecrated there to Anaitis, Amardatus, and Omanus, and the image of Omanus was carried round in processions. He concludes with the words: "this (_i.e._ the form of worship described) I have myself seen."[286] According to this account, then, Amardate,[287] _i.e._ the Amesha Çpenta Ameretat, who averts death, was worshipped there beside Anahita, and Omanus, _i.e._ the Amesha Çpenta Vohumano, the protector of the flocks, had an image. As this is all that we can discover about the image-worship of the Persians, it is clear that the influence of the picture-worship of Hither Asia and Egypt had no great influence even on the western nations of Iran. It is limited to the facts that Darius added the symbolical picture of Auramazda to his inscriptions without, however, building him a temple; that a century after him Artaxerxes II. erected statues and a temple to Anahita at Ecbatana; and that at a later time a portable image of Vohumano was in existence in Cappadocia.