How does a site get lost? It happens. For nearly a decade—from 1867 to 1875—General Luigi Palma de Cesnola, a flamboyant Italian who served as both the American and Russian consul to Cyprus, dug at Idalion (located 12 miles south of Nicosia), where, he claimed, he emptied 15,000 tombs. Cesnola’s exports from Idalion were used to help found the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Indeed, he became its first director. Cesnola also discovered what was thought to be a temple to the Mother Goddess at the site.
A year after he began his treasure hunt, another consul, this time British, also began to dig at Idalion, determined to enhance Commonwealth prestige (and, it is said, pocket a few pounds for himself). Robert (later Sir) Hamilton Lang also found what was thought to be a temple, and it is this site that was lost. His finds, however, were remarkable—hoards of coins;1 a Phoenician-Cypriot bilingual inscription, sometimes referred to as the Rosetta Stone of Cypro-syllabic script;2 and more than 100 limestone sculptures finely carved in a Greco-Near Eastern style, now in the British Museum.3
In his excavation report, however, Lang neglected to locate his 050dig on a map of the region.4 In 1890 a law was enacted allowing Cypriot farmers to settle unused land, farm it and thereby acquire title. In this way, the site of “Lang’s Temple,” as it came to be called, soon sank into oblivion.
In 1893, when Max Ohnefalsch-Richter, a German journalist and antiquarian, mapped the antiquities of the region, he guessed at the location of Lang’s Temple, based on the British consul’s sketchy description. For a long time this identification was accepted without question. An American expedition to Idalion, directed by Lawrence Stager and Anita Walker from 1971 to 1980, tested the site, however, and found that it was an undisturbed Roman villa—certainly not Lang’s Temple.5
In 1992 a University of Arizona expedition to Idalion that I directed stumbled across the steps of Lang’s Temple, which were camouflaged by a terrace wall.6 We spent the next five seasons excavating the site, which we have now concluded is not a temple at all. It contains a number of small workrooms, one of which included an olive-oil extracting installation. In an adjacent enclosure we found a deep ash deposit near a tabun, an earthen oven. Strewn about were potsherds of cookware. In a nearby excavation trench lay several pounding stones—some clearly used as mortars and some as pestles. Caked to the sherds and pounders were clumps of a yellow material that was identified by the Copper Institute of the University of Arizona as jarosite, a sulfurous compound that is a common by-product of copper working. Whatever went on here apparently included heating and working copper.
Another series of small enclosures contained stands for storage jars as well as a large number of cooking pots and jugs. One room contained the 051key to the site: In it we found numerous bone fragments—all radii (leg bones) of sheep or goats, the traditional body parts used in making burnt offerings.7 The structure was not a temple, but it was a sacred space, a kind of temenos—an outdoor sacred precinct. It also included an industrial area for copper working and oil pressing, not uncommon functions at ancient holy sites.a Food was also prepared and eaten in the temenos, as we know from the storage jars, cookware and jugs.
In 1993 we dug a series of probe trenches from the buildings to the edge of the hill, where we discovered a wall that ran all the way around the hill. On one side it is preserved to a height of over six feet.
Between the workrooms and the enclosure wall a series of terraces had been cut into the bedrock. Also cut into the bedrock were pits in which trees had been planted—an essential part of the temenos. This area, we realized, was once what the ancients called a sacred grove. The site must have been striking in ancient times, with trees rising from the white bedrock and stippling the hillside. Adding to the enchantment of the sacred grove, the bowl-shaped hill produces a whispering-gallery effect: While digging, we could often hear villagers speaking in a normal tone of voice half a mile away. Did ancient priests use this acoustical marvel to amaze their fellow worshipers?
What god or goddess was worshiped here cannot be determined with certainty. But the probabilities—and their connections—are tantalizing. We may have discovered that the Greek myth of Adonis can be traced back to the Israelite Lord!
It seems reasonably clear that the principal deity worshiped here was the 052local Cypriot god called Wanax. He is called Wanax, but that is not his name. Wanax is simply the generic Cypriot word meaning “male deity.” He is referred to in Cypro-syllabic inscriptions as “the Wanax” (the word means “Lord” [or “Young Lord”]; the Wanax is Lord of the Manor, a title also used for people). In some inscriptions, including at least one found at the site, the god is referred to as “the Wanax of Idalion.”8
Over the centuries successive Idalion kingdoms fell to the Phoenicians (about 450 B.C.), to the Greeks (about 200 B.C.) and then to the Romans (about 50 B.C.). The Phoenicians (who had settled Kition much earlier, around 900 B.C.), Greeks and Romans were all foreigners in Cyprus. One characteristic of ancient cultures is that they habitually equated deities they encountered in foreign lands with their own deities. The Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484–425 B.C.), for instance, states that the Egyptian goddess Isis is the same as the Greek goddess Demeter and that the Egyptian cat goddess Bubastis is the equivalent of the Greek huntress goddess Artemis.9 If deities shared one or two distinguishing characteristics, they were generally identified with one another.
One of the earliest Phoenician outposts on Cyprus was at Kition. In the Bible, Cyprus is referred to as the island of Kittim (see, for example, Jeremiah 2:10 and Ezekiel 27:6). Kittim is obviously derived from Kition. In about 450 B.C. the Phoenicians of Kition conquered Cypriot Idalion.10 Even before this conquest, however, Idalion was a cosmopolitan city inhabited by many foreigners as well as by Cypriots. But with the Phoenician conquest the number of Phoenician worshipers at the Idalion temenos must have increased dramatically. Under what name did the Phoenicians worship the local Cypriot deity?
The Phoenicians were the cultural heirs of Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 B.C.) Canaan. As the Philistines crowded the Canaanites out of the southern part of the eastern Mediterranean coast and the Israelites crowded them out of the central hill country, the Canaanites moved west and north, transforming themselves into the seafaring people we call Phoenicians. By the mid-first millennium B.C., the Phoenicians had brought their cultic practices to Cyprus.
In Northwest Semitic, the language group to which Phoenician belongs 054(as does Hebrew), there are two words that mean “Lord”: Ba’al and Adon. Ba’al had a very specific identity for Phoenicians—including the Phoenician Cypriot community at Kition—as the primary male deity. Thus Ba’al was not available as an appellation for the native Cypriot deity encountered by Phoenician traders at Idalion. Since the local Cypriots called their god the Wanax—that is, the Lord—the Phoenicians likely called this native god by their other word for “Lord”: Adon.
The name “Adon” appears in a number of Phoenician inscriptions in Cyprus, including one from Idalion.11 The title “Adon” must have been used to designate the local deity by Phoenician visitors who happened to worship in this shrine. For the local population, the god of the temenos probably maintained his indigenous nature, whether he was called the Wanax by native Cypriots or Adon by the foreign worshipers.
The Greeks took over the administration of Idalion from the Phoenicians around 300 B.C. The primary language when the Greeks arrived was Phoenician. So it would have been natural for the Greeks to assume that “Adon” was the name of the local deity rather than a title. The name “Adon” was then Hellenized by adding the Greek ending “is”—creating the familiar “Adonis.”
Later, after the Romans conquered Cyprus in the first century B.C., a number of poets cited lovely Idalium as the place where Venus had her fabled affair with Adonis.12 The name “Adonis” does not appear before the third century B.C. Handsome Adonis may well have been born in Idalion at about that time, derived from Adon.
In the Bible the Israelite god Yahweh is sometimes referred to as Adon, though the term is used as a title, not as the personal name of Yahweh (see, for example, Genesis 15:2 and Exodus 4:10). Eventually, the appellation “Adonai” (my Lord) became a substitution name for pronouncing in prayer the unutterable name Yahweh, which by the early rabbinical period (first and second centuries A.D.) had become too sacred to pronounce. To this day, when Jews encounter the consonants of “Yahweh” (YHWH) in prayer, they pronounce it “Adonai.” They might be shocked to learn that this substitution word is related to the Phoenician “Adon” and the Greek (and Cypriot) “Adonis.”
Across a small saddle above the Idalion temenos, on top of the hill, is the sanctuary of the Wanax’s consort, the Wanasa—the Cypriot Queen of Heaven. The Wanasa came to be identified with Aphrodite by the Greeks because she embodied fertility and sexuality. For the same reason, the Romans later identified her with Venus. Was this the birth of the myth of Venus and Adonis? For the Cypriots, the Wanasa was more than a fertility goddess: She was the supreme deity, mistress of all, creator of life and death, 055heaven and earth. She was all-powerful and all-knowing. And her worshipers were forbidden to create images of her; she could only be symbolized by a standing stone, called a betyl in the Cypriot tongue.b
Both of these practices—aniconism (the prohibition against graven images) and the use of a standing stone (massabah in Hebrew)—are characteristic of Israelite cultic practices. So we are led to ask, Is there a connection between worship in ancient Cyprus and worship in ancient Israel? Again, the link is the Phoenicians. Popular religion among the Israelites—as opposed to the “official” religion promoted in the Hebrew Bible, especially the Book of Deuteronomy—was similar to Phoenician religion. The Bible presents a purified, elite monotheism devoted exclusively to the worship of Yahweh. The orthodox, nationalistic parties that produced the Hebrew Bible proscribed the worship of Ba’al and suppressed all but the faintest traces of a theology that included a consort of Yahweh. But both Ba’al and this female goddess continued to live on in Israelite popular religious practices as well as in Phoenician (formerly Canaanite) practice.
At Kition the Canaanite and Phoenician god Ba’al is paired with the goddess Astarte.13 In Israel of the Iron Age (12th–6th centuries B.C.), Ba’al is coupled with the Canaanite goddess Asherah rather than with Astarte. However, as we know from 14th/13th-century B.C. cuneiform tablets from the Canaanite city of Ugarit, on the Mediterranean coast of modern Syria, Astarte and Asherah (along with the goddess Anat) had very similar natures and roles; they were manifestations of the great Mother Goddess. These three fertility goddesses were frequently fused into a single goddess, as was apparently the case in ancient Israel.14 But this composite goddess was always paired with a male god.
The male-female pair was proscribed in official Israelite religion, but it lived on in popular Israelite religion, as we now know from recently discovered Hebrew inscriptions. In 1968 at Khirbet el-Qom, 10 to 12 miles west of Hebron (probably biblical Makkadab), American archaeologist William G. Dever found an eighth-century B.C. tomb inscription invoking the blessing “by Yahweh and his Asherah.”15 In 1978 Israeli archaeologists excavating at another eighth-century B.C. site in the eastern Sinai desert—a combination fort-shrine at Kuntillet ’Ajrud—found several Hebrew inscriptions mentioning Ba’al and El (the chief god of the Canaanite pantheon and, in the form “Elohim,” a name sometimes used to refer to God in the Hebrew Bible) along with the blessing formula “by Yahweh and his Asherah.”16 Several scholars have argued that the term “Asherah” here cannot denote merely the tree-like symbol of the Mother Goddess, but must refer to the deity herself. In the Phoenician cult, paired deities were the rule. Ba’al’s consort was Asherah. And Asherah was the consort of Yahweh in Israelite popular religion.
The word “asherah” occurs (disapprovingly, of course) about 40 times in the Hebrew Bible. Only a few of these references, however, designate the goddess herself. The verbs used in passages referring to the word “asherah” make it clear that what is being referred to is the goddess’s symbol—either a living tree or a treelike wooden pole. An asherah was something that could be “made,” “erected,” “planted,” “cut down” or “burnt.” In Deuteronomy 16:21, for example, the Israelites are admonished, “You shall not plant any tree as an asherah beside the altar of the Lord.” In Judges 6:25, Gideon is told to “cut down the asherah that is beside” the altar of Ba’al; 061he is then directed to make a burnt offering, with the fire to be kindled from the wood of the cut-down asherah. In 1 Kings 14:23, wayward Judahites in the days following Solomon’s rule “built high places, pillars and asherim [plural of asherah] on every high hill and under every green tree.”
At Idalion, as we have seen, the deities were not only paired—a god accompanied by a goddess—they were also associated with sacred groves. The sacred grove at Idalion covers the sanctuaries of both the Wanax (the male deity) and the Wanasa (the female deity).
The local Cypriot god the Wanax, or the Lord, was worshiped by the Phoenicians as Adon and then later by the Greeks as Adonis. This god had a female consort, much like the Phoenician Asherah—a goddess whom the official Israelite religion had much difficulty in suppressing. Indeed, on Cyprus the paired gods were worshiped in a sacred grove just as they were in the Palestinian homeland—except for the fact that in Cyprus it was the goddess who was highest.
How does a site get lost? It happens. For nearly a decade—from 1867 to 1875—General Luigi Palma de Cesnola, a flamboyant Italian who served as both the American and Russian consul to Cyprus, dug at Idalion (located 12 miles south of Nicosia), where, he claimed, he emptied 15,000 tombs. Cesnola’s exports from Idalion were used to help found the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Indeed, he became its first director. Cesnola also discovered what was thought to be a temple to the Mother Goddess at the site. A year after he began his treasure hunt, another consul, this […]
You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.
All over the eastern Mediterranean, cultic installations are commonly associated with economic endeavors. In Cyprus the bronze “ingot god” from Enkomi is an example from a Late Bronze Age copper-producing site. The small shrine of late Cypriot Athienou, seven miles from Idalion, was closely associated with a copper-smelting installation. Athienou’s small sanctuary, with its hundreds of votive vessels, was excavated by Trude Dothan and Amnon Ben-Tor in the early 1970s.
2.
The original betyl of the Wanasa’s sanctuary in Old Paphos, modern Kouklia, is on display in the Kouklia Museum in Cyprus.
Endnotes
1.
See Robert Hamilton Lang, “On Coins Discovered During Recent Excavations in the Island of Cyprus,” Numismatic Chronicle and Journal of the Numismatic Society 11 (1871), pp. 1–18; and “Treasure-Trove in Cyprus of Gold Staters,” ibid., pp. 229–234.
2.
See Lang, “On the Discovery of Some Cypriot Inscriptions,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, 2nd ser. 4 (1871), p. 131; and “Narrative of Excavations in a Temple at Dali (Idalium) in Cyprus,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, 2nd ser. 11 (1878), pp. 50–52.
3.
See, for example, Pamela Gaber-Saletan, The Sculpture from Idalion and Regional Styles in Cypriot Limestone Sculpture (New York: Garland Press, 1986); Frederick N. Pryce, Catalogue of Sculpture in the Department of Greek and Roman Art of the British Museum, vol. 1, part 1 (London: British Museum Trustees, 1931).
4.
See Pamela Gaber, “In Search of Adonis,” in F. Vandenabeele and R. Laffineur, eds., Cypriot Stone Sculpture: Proceedings of the Second International Conference of Cypriot Studies, Brussels-Liege, 17–19 May, 1993(Brussels-Liege: Univ. of Belgium, Institute of Archaeology, 1994), pp. 161–165, pls. 47–50; and Gaber and Margaret Morden, “The 1992 Excavations in the Adonis Temenos at Idalion,” Cahiers des etudes chypriotes 2 (1992), pp. 21–26, figs. 1–5.
5.
Anita Walker, “Late Hellenistic and Early Roman Building Near the Site of Lang’s Temple,” in L. Stager, A. Walker and G. Wright, eds., American Expedition to Idalion, Cyprus: First Preliminary Report: Seasons of 1971 and 1972 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 76–77.
6.
See Gaber, “In Search of Adonis.”
7.
Sacrifices in the Archaic precinct of the Temple of Apollo Hylates at Kourion used primarily the right hind limb. See S.J.M. Davis, “Animal Sacrifices,” in D. Buitron et. al., The Sanctuary of Apollo Hylates at Kourion, Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology 109 (Göteborg, Sweden: Astrians Forlag, 1996), pp. 181–182.
8.
It is interesting that elsewhere on Cyprus the Young Lord is referred to by name (though he is called “Wah-wah” in the Paphos district). See Olivier Masson, “L’inscription syllabiqes en Paphien recent du village de Tala (Paphos),” Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus (1988), pp. 63–68.
9.
Herodotus, Histories, 2.156.5.
10.
“The History of Ancient Idalion in the Light of Recent Excavations,” in Paul Wallace, ed., Visitors, Immigrants, and Invaders in Cyprus (Albany: State Univ. of New York, Albany Press, 1995), pp. 32–39.
11.
See, for example, inscription nos. 31, 32, 39, 40, 41 and 43 in H. Donner and W. Rollig, Kanaanaische und Aramaische Inschriften, vol. 1, Texte (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 1971), pp. 4–10. Inscription no. 39 (p. 8) is the bilingual inscription from the Adonis temenos at Idalion. Both Adon and Reshef Mikal appear in this inscription. Inscriptions 33–37 are from Kition and mention Ba’al.
12.
For example Propertius 2.13.51.
13.
See Donner and Rollig, Kanaanaische und Aramaische Inschriften, pp. 7–8. Inscriptions 32–37 are from Kition.
14.
For the evidence, see Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of Religion in Israel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 28–35; and William G. Dever, “Asherah, Consort of Yahweh? New Evidence from Kuntillet ’Ajrud,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 255 (1984), pp. 28–29 and references there.
15.
See Dever, “Asherah, Consort of Yahweh?”
16.
See Ruth Hestrin, “The Lachish Ewer and the Tree ’Asherah,’” Israel Exploration Journal 37 (1987), pp. 212–223, and “Understanding Asherah—Exploring Semitic Iconography,”BAR 17:05; and S.M. Olyan, Asherah and the Cult of Yahweh in Israel (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988).
