All About Aphrodite, Greek Goddess of Love | Greek Mythology: True Stories | BBC timestamp

I think it was possibly here that a really important lesson was learned. Somewhere, one day, an inquisitive Euboean sat with a Phoenician and looked and listened while the Phoenician wrote out the letters of his script and described them. And the Greek adapted them and copied them down as letters still in use in the modern Greek alphabet, alpha, beta, gamma. Exactly the order which we know Phoenicians used for their own letters, The Greek thought he needed signs for the vowel sounds he was hearing, so he added them, epsilon, iota and so forth, making the fullest alphabet the one which is most easy to read. And it's that Greek alphabet that is the ancestor of all the alphabets we still use in the modern West. As the alphabet developed, myths could eventually become more fixed as they were written down. But during the Greek Dark Ages, they were still told orally and open to influence. On Cyprus, we can follow this happening to the story of a local fertility goddess. Like other visitors to Amathus, Euboeans encountered her shrine. Her worship here dates as far back as the 2000s BC. Through contact with visitors from the Near East, she then took on a wilder sexual identity. And then when the Greeks arrived, she became Aphrodite. Jacqueline Karyogis has spent her whole life studying the transformations of the goddess of love. When the Greek came to the island in the 12th century BC, it seems they found the oriental goddess and they adopted her because we don't know that they had the name Aphrodite. So a goddess of love and sex is in fact, for the Greeks, an introduction in the early Dark Ages. Yes, and it seems that the Greeks have changed her from her sexual aspect to the aspect of a goddess of love, of beauty. Beauty is a very Greek element. You're making this Greek Aphrodite sound as though she lived in Paris. She's sexy and all the rest of it. But Jacqueline, there are said to have been prostitutes here serving the cult of the goddess, at least by Christian sources. Do you believe that? Well, Herodotus said it was a ritual in Cyprus. He says that the girls had to come once in their lifetime to the temple to offer their virginity to the goddess. And then they kept the money as their dowry, is that right? It was a way of having an income, I suppose, that's why the sanctuary was so rich. And nowadays their fathers build them a house. To the west of Amathus is another place now associated with Aphrodite. It is known as the Rock of Aphrodite. And the local story is that if you swim all the way round this rock, you are blessed with eternal beauty. The beach alongside is now considered the location of Aphrodite's literal emergence. Of course, the story of Aphrodite is connected to much grander stories in heaven, Jacqueline. When Father Heaven is castrated, of course, blood and white sperm flies everywhere. And according to the Greeks, when the sperm falls down into the sea, somebody very significant is born from it, your goddess, Aphrodite. And the Greeks, when they later thought about it, tried to connect that name, Aphrodite, with their own Greek word, aphros, meaning foam or foaming white sperm. Do you think there was any historical truth in that? I don't think it's the real etymology of the name, but it's a very clever way of explaining Aphrodite, a very poetical one. Right, like a word play. Yes, like a word play. That was a pretty good way to be born. But there is the local story that when she was born, she was washed to this very beach. This is what the Cyprus Tourist Board still tells you nowadays, Jacqueline. Do you think there's any history in that? Well, this is a very recent tradition to associate this beach with Aphrodite. We don't have any proof that it was the real place where she came on land in Cyprus. Although ancients said that they could see her footprints on the beach, but which beach, we don't know. I have been through traveller's books to find references to this special beach, but I could not find any references. When is the first thing, do you think? Well, I could say during the last 50 years. But it shows beautifully how what will be a myth, I'm sure, continued in modern Cyprus, begins and starts from a beautiful landscape and then acquires a force of its own, exactly as it did in the ancient world. This is how myths are made.