Athena is attested before the alphabet. Linear B tablets from Mycenaean Knossos, written centuries before Homer, record an offering to a-ta-na po-ti-ni-ja, most naturally read as the Lady of Athana, which places a goddess bound to that site deep in the Bronze Age. Scholars have long suspected that behind the Olympian daughter of Zeus stands an older palace goddess, a protectress of the citadel and its ruler, later fitted into the Olympian family.
That older role survives in her constant function as poliouchos, the holder of the city. Across the Greek world it was Athena who guarded the fortified height, and the image that fell from heaven, the palladion of Troy, was hers; a city that held its palladion could not fall.
In later reception she became a figure of reason and the arts detached from cult, the emblem on academies and law courts far from Greece. That afterlife is real but selective: it keeps the wisdom and drops the armed guardian of a specific hill, the goddess to whom actual Athenians actually sacrificed for the safety of a real town.