Anyone who’s had a look at the introduction to THE INVENTION OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY knows that this manuscript and author are all about diversity, multiculturalism, and mixing of peoples and ideas.
And recently I read (here, a very good account with illustrations) about another very exciting indicator of the diversity of beliefs in Greece even at the very beginning of what we might call Greek Mythology, or maybe more accurately, Greek religion.
It’s a mystery about a goddess who was worshipped in Greece but was not in origin Greek. At the same time, she might have had influence on the makeup of goddesses worshipped in later Greek Mythology, such as Demeter or Athena.
Her name? Potnia Asia.
No, not quite that Asia, but you’re on the right track. We’ll get to that.
Potnia is a Greek word for “mistress” or “lady,” a respected female personage who may be an immortal or a human.
There were many Potnias in the Greek Bronze Age, about 3,500 years ago, which is at least 500 years before the Greek Mythology we know really got started. A Potnia was a generic goddess who was worshipped for various reasons.
For example, there is a Potnia Atana, with Atana most likely a place name, maybe the city of Athens. Did Potnia Atana become Athena later on in Greek Mythology’s history? The jury’s still out on that one.
There was a Potnia of horses as well.
And there’s an even more general goddess of animals, Potnia Theron, or Mistress of the Beasts. Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, was considered a Potnia Theron.
So what about the Lady of Asia, Potnia Asia? Is she the mistress of an entire continent?
Not so much. Asia the name started out as a very specific place in ancient Anatolia (modern Turkey), on the west coast of the Aegean Sea, facing Greece, near the ancient important Greek city of Ephesus and a few miles by water from the island of Samos, which was one of the chief sacred sites of the goddess Hera.
For example, Homer, in the Iliad, talks about the “Asian meadow” bisected by the Cayster River (modern Küçükmenderes), a place filled with flocks of birds.
From there, the name “Asia” caught on (the ancient Greek historian Herodotus uses it this way) as the designation for the entire Turkish peninsula, and when, later, Europeans decided to name a whole continent Asia, the former Asia became Asia Minor.
So is Potnia Asia a Greek goddess? Maybe a thousand years later we hear of a goddess who is named Asia—one of the Oceanids, sea goddesses who are the daughters of the Titans Oceanus and Tethys. But this Asia is quite likely not a direct descendant of Potnia Asia.
There is better evidence elsewhere, in the non-Greek world. Scholars have been certain for some time that Asia is the Greek name for Assuwa, an Anatolian nation located in between the Mycenaean (Bronze Age) Greeks and the powerful Hittites of central Anatolia. Assuwa contained Homer’s Asian meadow and a good amount of territory to the north and south.
So scholars conclude that the Potnia Asia is a non-Greek goddess, a “Lady of Assuwa” who came to be worshipped in Greece. The superstar scholar Sarah Morris writes a beautiful account of our knowledge of the deity, who shows up in the accounting records from the royal palace in the Bronze Age city of Pylos in southwestern Greece (see underneath the N of DANAOI on the map above). A dedication to Potnia Asia of perfumed oil in the amount of 150 liters (a huge amount, according to Professor Morris) testifies to her importance as a goddess.
What’s more, the same records show that a large number of non-Greek women, at least some of them Anatolian or from places close to there, were living and working in the same area of the palace. Professor Morris thinks it very likely that these women transported the worship of Potnia Asia to Pylos when they were either captured or rescued from war-torn areas contested by the Mycenaeans, Assuwans, and Hittites.
This type of situation recalls stories from Greek Mythology immortalized in Athenian tragic plays such as The Trojan Women, about captive women from Anatolia having to start new lives in Greece.
Did Potnia Asia survive the Bronze Age? Did she come into Greek Mythology as a different goddess? That’s not clear. A lot of things in Greek religion changed between the Bronze Age and the first writing-down of mythology hundreds of years later.
We do know of an important Anatolian goddess, Artemis of Ephesus, who made waves in later Greek times. Ephesus is located near Homer’s Asia and right next to Assuwa. This is not the classical Artemis, who is unmarried and a mistress of the wilderness. Instead, she is a mother goddess more like Demeter; she wears a
garment like Athena’s protective goat-hide aegis. The Bronze Age prototype of this goddess would have been a perfect guardian of women who had been uprooted from their native lands and needed a sense of home and security.
Whatever the identity of Potnia Asia, it’s clear that here is a non-Greek goddess who is being worshipped in a Greek place, a small but significant reminder that the mixing of cultures in Greece started very early and we should not be at all surprised to see that Greek Mythology itself is a diverse mix—a kind of stone soup that became nourishing through the contributions of many different peoples.