written. According to Stephen J. Shoemaker, ”its interest in Mary as a figure in her own right and its reverence for her sacred purity mark the beginnings of Marian piety within early Christianity”. 3rd to 5th centuries Christian devotion to Mary predates the emergence of a specific Marian liturgical system in the 5th century, following the First Council of Ephesus in 431. In Egypt, the veneration of Mary had started in the 3rd century and the term was used by Origen, the Alexandrian Father of the Church. The earliest known Marian prayer (the , or Beneath Thy Protection) is from the 3rd century (perhaps 270), and its text was rediscovered in 1917 on a papyrus in Egypt. Following the Edict of Milan in 313, by the 5th century artistic images of Mary began to appear in public and larger churches were being dedicated to Mary, such as the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. The Council of Ephesus itself was long thought to have been held at a church in Ephesus which had been dedicated to Mary about a hundred years before. Though, recent archeological surveys indicate that St. Mary's Church in Ephesus did not exist at the time of the Council or, at least, the building was not dedicated to Mary before 500. The Church of the Seat of Mary in Palestine was built shortly after the introduction of Marian liturgy at the council of Ephesus, in 456, by a widow named Ikelia. According to the 4th-century heresiologist Epiphanius of Salamis, the Virgin Mary was worshipped as a mother goddess in the Christian sect of Collyridianism, which was found throughout Arabia sometime during the 300s AD. Collyridianism had women performing priestly acts, and made bread offerings to the Virgin Mary. The group was condemned as heretical by the Roman Catholic Church and was preached against by Epiphanius of Salamis, who wrote about the group in his writings titled Panarion. Byzantium Ephesus is a cultic centre of Mary, the site of the first church dedicated to her and the rumoured place of her death. Ephesus was previously a centre for worship of Artemis, a virgin goddess; the Temple of Artemis there is regarded as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The cult of Mary was furthered by Queen Theodora in the 6th century. According to William E. Phipps, in the book Survivals of Roman Religion, "Gordon