Aphrodite, goddess of Cyprus

Cultures loving cultures

In my quest to delineate how Greek Mythology got started—and how its diversity of origins is its ultimate strength—I find myself coming back to Cyprus over and over again.

Unfortunately, not in person, just in my mind. I’ve been there and I want to go back. Think positive thoughts about that. The airfare alone is a killer.

Cyprus is worth visiting for anyone interested in Greek Mythology, or in history, or just in wanting to go somewhere that shows us who we are as humans. It really defies description as a place; to understand, you have to go.

A little background for you: Cyprus is that leaf-shaped island in the middle of the eastern Mediterranean Sea, with Turkey to the north, Lebanon and Israel to the east (Jerusalem is only about 300 miles away), and Egypt to the south.

The island has had thousands of years of history and prehistory, and it’s been ruled by many foreign powers. Currently, it is the only sovereign nation that is partitioned into two sectors, the Greek sector and the Turkish sector. The reasons for the partition are complex, and reunification is still a dream, but (absent the pandemic) there have been rays of hope.

Cyprus is important for Greek Mythology because the island is Aphrodite’s home base. It’s where she got started as a Greek goddess. She is called the Paphian One after Paphos, a gorgeous little town on the south coast of the island.

Aphrodite is a great test case for figuring out how the first Greeks collaborated with their near neighbors to create what we now know as the pantheon of the Olympian divinities.

So how did Aphrodite get her start here?

Well, first of all, she didn’t start off as Greek. Her name is not Greek, although the Greeks themselves thought her name might be “foam-born” from the Greek word aphros, foam. This idea comes from the story in the poet Hesiod that Aphrodite was born from the foam that arose from the blood dropping into the sea from the god Ouranos’ severed genitals.

A story for another time.

The very astute scholar Stephanie Budin has argued that Aphrodite started off as a bird goddess among the indigenous Cypriot islanders. We can’t know this for sure until we decipher their language, known as Eteocypriot.

We do know that another Semitic (Lebanese-Syrian-Mesopotamian) goddess named Astarte came to Cyprus at the end of the Bronze Age (1200 BCE) when Greeks were also emigrating to the island. These Greeks were fleeing the destruction of their civilization (another story for another time, or watch the video about it) and made Cyprus their home.

Astarte, a goddess of both love and war, may have mixed with the indigenous bird goddess to create Aphrodite, the goddess of love whose favorite animal was the dove.

According to Professor Budin, Aphrodite (was that her original name? We don’t know) then migrated from Cyprus to the nearby Greek-inhabited island of Crete, and from there to mainland Greece, where she had never been known before.

So would the Greeks have just started worshipping a goddess that wasn’t from their culture?

Yes.

In the ancient world, religion was not a matter of “I’m right, you’re wrong.” People worshipped divinities that struck them as useful to worship. And if one was exposed to different divinities in different cultures, people would have the opportunity to decide for themselves who to worship.

That exposure, on Cyprus at least, was very pronounced. Another scholar, Maria Iacovou, has let us know that at the time that Aphrodite was developing as a goddess, Cyprus was being inhabited by three different and distinct sets of people who apparently lived on somewhat friendly terms. These people were Greeks, indigenous Cypriots, and (Semitic) Phoenicians from Lebanon.

We know the relationships were friendly because the Greeks, who became the more politically ascendant group of people, decided to use the Cypriot syllabary writing system of their neighbors to write inscriptions. When the Greek alphabet was invented around 800 BCE, these Greeks didn’t change over to the new way of writing their language; they continued on with the non-Greek script until Alexander the Great conquered them some centuries later.

Use my writing system, use my gods and goddesses. There’s not much difference there.

So this is the possible process for Aphrodite on Cyprus: there was a native goddess who mixed with a Semitic goddess who was adopted by Greeks in Cyprus who then exported her to mainland Greece. All three of these peoples had different languages and cultures. But they could agree on one thing: love is a powerful, even divine, force.

Worth of worship for sure.

Image of Aphrodite’s Rock near Paphos from this site.