Black Athena: Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization; Volume III: The Linguistic Evidence

Chapter 19: Divine Names: Gods, Mythical Creatures, Heroes

[CH. 19] DIVINE NAMES 453 CHAPTER 19 DIVINE NAMES Gods, Mythical Creatures, Heroes INTRODUCTION: GODS The names of nearly all the gods came from Egypt. I know from the enquiries I have made, that they came from abroad and it is most likely that they came from Egypt, For the names of all the gods have been known in Egypt since the beginning of time.1 The sea made it natural for Greeks to turn to neighbouring maritime peoples rather than to the hill-dwellers who lived on the European mainland. Egypt and Asia Minor were more interesting than Macedonia and Illyria. From these already ancient cultures the early Greeks learned many things: the names of exotic gods and goddesses such as Hera and Athena, who became fully naturalized . . .2 T he two quotations above demonstrate that the general claims made in this chapter are neither new nor entirely out of fashion . Furthermore, Herodotos and other ancient writers paired Egyptian with Greek deities: Ammon with Zeus, Neith with Athena, Ptah with Hephaistos and so on. The second passage illustrates that some modern scholars still entertain such general views. What is new in this project are descriptions of the modes by which specific Greek divine names derived from Egyptian prototypes. 454 BLACK ATHENA In Chapter 5, I argued that the inordinate number of prothetic vowels in Greek can be explained as the result of massive borrowings from Afroasiatic: either from words beginning with >aleph, ‘ayin, he and h≥et or from the prothetic vowels used, but not always written, in Egyptian.3 The proportion of the names of Greek gods and heroes beginning with alpha is significantly higher than it is for words in the vocabulary as a whole. Among the gods one finds Apollo, Aphrodite, Ares, Artemis, and Askle–pios, for example. All of these—with the exception of Ares—have strong Egyptian etymologies and very implausible Indo-European ones. Furthermore, these are not the only Greek divine names of Afroasiatic origin. I believe that I can show that Hephaistos, Enualios and Zeus all have reasonable-to-good Egyptian etyma. H°PR “BECOME” H°PRR, APOLLO, ASKLE–PIOS, PYTHON AND DELPHI Chapter 21 will focus on Hermes and Chapter 22 on Athena. This one begins with Apollo as its central figure as well as with names associated with him; notably those of his avatar Asklepios, as well as Apollo’s city Delphi his sea mammal delphis, his sacred plant daphne\ and his birthplace Delos. The rest of this chapter will list the names of gods already treated and consider some others that have not so far been discussed. APOLLO THE “ARYAN” From at least the fifth century BCE until the early nineteenth CE Apollo was universally assumed to be the young god of the sun. Karl Ottfried Müller challenged this image with his view that Apollo was the dynamic “golden-haired” tribal god of the northern Dorians. He claimed that the earliest Greek texts did not refer to the god’s solar aspects.4 Its arguments —and those of his successors—against the long-standing tradition of Apollo as a sun god were and remain impressive. Apollo is an important divinity in the works of Hesiod and Homer but he is known as an archer, bringer of disease, a healer and the leader of the muses. Nowhere in these works is he explicitly equated with Helios, the divinized phenomenon of the “sun.” Helios and Eos “dawn” appear frequently in the epics without any reference to Apollo. In the mid-nineteenth century K. O. Müller’s view was submerged by what L. R. Farnell called “the foolish extravagances of the solar myth [CH. 19] DIVINE NAMES 455 theory” championed by Max Müller.5 The debate between the two interpretations has swung back and forth since then with various attempts at compromise.6 Nevertheless, while the popular view of Apollo as a sun god survives, most scholars generally side with Karl Ottfried Müller on this issue even while deprecating his extreme Aryanism.7 In the nineteenth century there was no doubt that Apollo originated from the north. This theory was largely based on the traditions of Hyperborean men and women associated with the god’s cult at both Delphi and Delos. Hyperborean was generally taken to mean “beyond the north wind.”8 In the early twentieth century by G. F. Hudson demolished the northern connection strongly...