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Ares was the son of Zeus and Hera and regarded as one of the Twelve Olympians and was seen as one of the most powerful gods. The name Ares is believed to have derived from the word for curse or ruin. He was the representative of destruction caused by war and he was the personification of war in its most destructive form. Like so many other Greek deities it is believed that he was first worshipped by the Mycenaean Greeks. They were the Greeks who are recorded in the Iliad and whose vast palaces have been unearthed by archaeologists. References to Ares was found on tablets written in the Archaic Greek known as Linear-B <ref>Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion (Harvard, Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 134</ref>. Once the Greeks had another war God, known as Enyalius, but in later myths, he became a byname for Ares. According to some, he Ares originated in Thrace, which was traditionally inhabited by fearsome warriors. Many experts have observed that Ares had many of the characteristics of the Indo-European war-god and is similar to deities such as the Germanic God Wotan. Ares was never popular and there were very few temples and shrines to him in the Hellenic World. There was a shrine to the god on a hill near Athens and this was later the site of the courts, which dealt with capital cases. Ares was mainly worshipped by soldiers and by armies on campaigns<ref> Graves, Robert. The Greeks Myths (London, Pelican, 1990), p. 45</ref>.