Zeus the nominative is ("Zeús"). It is inflected as follows: vocative: (""); accusative: (); genitive: (); dative: (). Diogenes Laertius quotes Pherecydes of Syros as spelling the name, . "Zeus" is the Greek continuation of *"," the name of the Proto-Indo-European god of the daytime sky, also called *' ("Sky Father"). The god is known under this name in the Rigveda (Vedic Sanskrit "Dyaus/Dyaus Pita"), Latin (compare "Jupiter", from "Iuppiter", deriving from the Proto-Indo-European vocative *'), deriving from the root *"dyeu"- ("to shine", and in its many derivatives, "sky, heaven, god"). Zeus is the only deity in the Olympic pantheon whose
Zeus the leaves and branches. By the time Herodotus wrote about Dodona, female priestesses called peleiades ("doves") had replaced the male priests. Zeus's consort at Dodona was not Hera, but the goddess Dione — whose name is a feminine form of "Zeus". Her status as a titaness suggests to some that she may have been a more powerful pre-Hellenic deity, and perhaps the original occupant of the oracle. The oracle of Ammon at the Siwa Oasis in the Western Desert of Egypt did not lie within the bounds of the Greek world before Alexander's day, but it already loomed large in