Nine Muses from Greek Mythology (c1592). In ancient Greek religion and mythology, the Muses are the inspirational goddesses of literature, science, and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge embodied in the poetry, lyric songs, and myths that were related orally for centuries in ancient Greek culture. Melete, Aoede, and Mneme are the original Boeotian Muses, and Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, and Urania are the nine Olympian Muses. In modern figurative usage, a Muse may be a source of artistic inspiration. The word Muses perhaps came from the o-grade of the Proto-Indo-European root, or from root since all the most important cult-centres of the Muses were on mountains or hills. Beekes rejects the latter etymology and suggests that a Pre-Greek origin is also possible. The earliest known records of the Muses come from Boeotia. Some ancient authorities regarded the Muses as of Thracian origin. In Thrace, a tradition of three original Muses persisted. Writers similarly disagree also concerning the number of the Muses; for some say that there are three, and others that there are nine, but the number nine has prevailed since it rests upon the authority of the most distinguished men, such as Homer and Hesiod and others like them. Diodorus states that Osiris first recruited the nine Muses, along with the satyrs, while passing through Aethiopia, before embarking on a tour of all Asia and Europe, teaching the arts of cultivation wherever he went. According to Hesiod's account, generally followed by the writers of antiquity, the Nine Muses were the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, figuring as personifications of knowledge and the arts, especially poetry, literature, dance and music. The Roman scholar Varro relates that there are only three Muses: one born from the movement of water, another who makes sound by striking the air, and a third who is embodied only in the human voice. They were called Melete or Practice, Mneme or Memory and Aoide or Song. The Quaestiones Convivales of Plutarch also report three ancient Muses. However, the classical understanding of the Muses tripled their triad and established a set of nine goddesses, who embody the arts and inspire creation with their graces through remembered and improvised song and mime, writing, traditional music, and dance. It was not until Hellenistic times that the following systematic set of functions became associated with them, and even then some variation persisted both in their names and in their attributes: Clio, Euterpe, Thalia, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Erato, Polyhymnia, Urania. According to Pausanias, who wrote in the later second century AD, there were originally three Muses, worshipped on Mount Helicon in Boeotia: Aoide, Melete, and Mneme. Together, these three form the complete picture of the preconditions of poetic art in cult practice. In Delphi too three Muses were worshiped, but with other names: Nete, Mese, and Hypate, which are assigned as the names of the three chords of the ancient musical instrument, the lyre. Alternatively, later they were called Cephisso, Apollonis, and Borysthenis-names which characterize them as daughters of Apollo. A later tradition recognized a set of four Muses: Thelxinoe, Aoide, Arche, and Melete, said to be daughters of Zeus and Plusia or of Ouranos. One of the people frequently associated with the Muses was Pierus. By some he was called the father of a total of seven Muses, called, Acheloes, and. According to Hesiod's Theogony, they were daughters of Zeus, king of the gods, and Mnemosyne, Titan goddess of memory. Hesiod in Theogony narrates that the Muses brought to people forgetfulness, that is, the forgetfulness of pain and the cessation of obligations. For Alcman and Mimnermus, they were even more primordial, springing from the early deities Ouranos and Gaia. Gaia is Mother Earth, an early mother goddess who was worshipped at Delphi from prehistoric times, long before the site was rededicated to Apollo, possibly indicating a transfer to association with him after that time.