Looking for Aphrodite

David Price Williams

Description

Knidos was renowned for its nude statue of the goddess Aphrodite. This book is about searching for Aphrodite, a memoire exploring the author’s involvement with the excavation of the huge city, while his own life was transformed from adolescent gaucheness into the beginnings of maturity. Laced with poetic evocations of the ancient and modern world, it contains hilarious stories of the people he met along the way.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Ancient
• History
• Greece

Informations

• Publié par: Markosia Enterprises Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781909276604
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

LOOKING FOR APHRODITE
by
David Price Williams



Looking For Aphrodite © 2015 David Price Williams & Markosia Enterprises, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction of any part of this work by any means without the written permission of the publisher is expressly forbidden. Published by Markosia Enterprises, PO BOX 3477, Barnet, Hertfordshire, EN5 9HN. FIRST PRINTING, July 2015.
Harry Markos, Director.
Paperback: ISBN 978-1-909276-51-2
Hardback: ISBN 978-1-909276-59-8
eBook: ISBN 978-1-909276-60-4
Book design by: Ian Sharman
COVER PICTURE:
Ludovisi Aphrodite.
Roman copy after a Greek original of the Knidian Aphrodite.
National Museum of Rome
www.markosia.com
First Edition



CONTENTS
Athenian Avant-Garde i
Pronunciation iv
Chapter 1 Yazid goes to Church 1
Chapter 2 In the Beginning 5
Chapter 3 Getting There 11
Chapter 4 One Promiscuous Mass of Ruins 23
Chapter 5 Peopling the Past 32
Chapter 6 Time and Time Again 39
Chapter 7 The Tea House 46
Chapter 8 In the Pink 60
Chapter 9 Learning to Speak 73
Chapter 10 Dramatis Personae 85
Chapter 11 Taking the Pithos 97
Chapter 12 Village of Destiny 111
Chapter 13 Visiting Mariners 129
Chapter 14 Beware of the Dog 143
Chapter 15 Beaux Gendarmes 150
Chapter 16 Stick to It 157
Chapter 17 Church Fate 160
Chapter 18 Parallel Lives 174
Chapter 19 These Little Things 185
Chapter 20 Dialling a Large Number 191
Chapter 21 Being Somewhere 199
Chapter 22 Sonny and the Magic Eye 207
Chapter 23 Round One 216
Chapter 24 The Demes Of Knidos 230
Musings and Acknowledgments 241
Map of South-Western Turkey and the Dodecanese Islands 243
Plan of the Excavations at Knidos 243
The Cayhane and the Pink Temple Crew 244
The Excavation of the Round Temple and Aphrodite 245
The Author at Knidos 246



Athenian Avant-Garde
There have been several notable moments in the history of mankind where some single event, usually catastrophic, has come to symbolize what was subsequently realized to be a paradigm shift in human culture – perhaps the burning of the Parthenon by the Persians in 480 BC, a disaster which ushered in the Golden Age of Athens and the world’s first democracy; maybe the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 AD, seen by many to be the end of civilization and the start of the Dark Ages; or the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, heralding the arrival of the Turks in Anatolia and the beginning of the end for the Christian Byzantine Empire; or 1815, the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo presaging the dawn of modern Europe.
But, with one remarkable exception, there has never been anything as iconic as an individual statue, let alone a female statue, which can aptly be said to personify the birth of a whole revolution in human imagination and universal ambition. That exception is the Aphrodite of Knidos. Sculpted by the gifted Greek artist Praxiteles in his studio in Athens somewhere about 350 BC, the Aphrodite came to personify the emancipation of society from prudery, prejudice and parochialism, to herald the ending of the ancient world and to chart the birth of the new all-embracing philosophies and ideals of Hellenism, many of which are with us to this day, though this event is more usually characterized by the military exploits of that world-bestriding hero Alexander the Great and the spread of a new vision of freedom of thought and commerce. The Praxiteles Aphrodite, commonly known as the Knidia , was so radical and innovative not only because she was said to be the most beautiful and natural representation of the female form ever created, but especially because she was sculpted undraped. For the first time a female deity had been carved totally unclothed, revealed in all her astounding beauty.
The Knidians had bought her to commemorate the relocation of their own citizenry to a brand new city which they had built at a spectacular site on the coast of


i



south western Caria, in what today is southern Turkey. She was to make a radical statement in celebration of their entry into that brave new world of Hellenism and the consequent opening of a new epoch of internationalism. Maybe initially they had intended her to be exclusively a new patron goddess for their city; perhaps they had hoped to revere and worship her modestly and privately as their own cultic manifestation. But she didn’t remain like that. She became one of the most famous statues of all time, if not THE most famous, and to this day there is none that has achieved anywhere near that same universal acclaim.
Pliny the Elder, the Roman encyclopaedist, who famously expired in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, wrote:-
(It was through Praxiteles’) fame as a worker of marble that he surpassed even himself. Superior to all his works, and indeed those of the whole world, is the Aphrodite, which many people have sailed to Knidos in order to see. For with that statue Praxiteles made Knidos famous. Her shrine is completely open, so that it is possible to observe the image of the goddess from every side; she herself, it is believed, favored its being made that way.
Pliny: Naturalis Historia
A further description of the actual statue comes from Lucian of Samosata, writing in the following century:-
When we had exhausted the charms of the gardens we passed on into the temple itself. The goddess stands in the middle of it, her beautiful form made of Parian marble. Her lips are slightly parted in a smile of proud contempt. Nothing hides her beauty, which is entirely exposed, other than a furtive hand veiling her modesty. The art of the sculptor has succeeded so well that it seems the solid nature of the marble has shed its hardness to mold the grace of her limbs.
Pseudo-Lucian: Erotes


ii



Apparently people travelled from everywhere in the Mediterranean to gaze at this remarkable representation of the Aphrodite of Knidos, Goddess of Love.
But that was not all. Innumerable copies were made of the Knidian Aphrodite by a phalanx of sculptors from Spain to Syria and in that way she became the most celebrated version of the feminine figure ever crafted. The original was said to be slightly larger than life size, but there are unmistakable copies of her, in all sizes, found from one end of the Old World to the other, some as the original in the totally nude form, others with a drape around her midriff, perhaps the most well-known of which is of course the Venus de Milo, in the Louvre museum in Paris.
But what of Knidos, this city whose forward-thinking Hellenistic inhabitants bought the original of the Aphrodite from Athens over 2,300 years ago? What happened to that? And what happened to the famed sculpture itself which changed the whole perception of art and the female form for ever? And is there any evidence remaining of the temple in which the statue had once been openly exhibited, as described by Pliny, so that, as he said, her beauty could be observed on every side?
This narrative seeks to answer those questions. It charts the exploration of ancient Knidos, conducted during an archaeological excavation almost fifty years ago. And at the same time it’s an exploration that launched the author, who was present at the dig, on a trajectory along which he too experienced a revolution in his own way of life, just as the Knidians had done all that time ago, rejoicing in their famed statue.


iii



PRONUNCIATION
The Turkish words in the text are written with the Turkish phonetic alphabet used commonly in Turkish orthography. The individual letters have the following values:-
C is pronounced J, as in Cengis = Jengis or Cumhur = Jumhur
Ç is pronounced Ch, as in Çayhane = Chayhane
I without a dot is pronounced Er as in Yazιköy = Yazerkoy
Ğ in the middle of a word is pronounced silently as in olacağım =olaja’erm
Ş is pronounced Sh, as in Şerefe = Sherefe
Ü is pronounced Oo, as in Gün = Goon
David is transcribed in Turkish as Deyvit
I have used the Turkish spelling of Knidos rather than the Anglicised version Cnidus except where it is used directly or indirectly from quotations. Actually, the local Turks, not liking two consonants together, pronounce the name as ‘Kinidos’.


iv



CHAPTER ONE
YAZID GOES TO CHURCH
The sea is a boundless expanse whereon great ships look like minute specks; naught but the heavens above and the waters beneath. Trust it little. Fear it much.
‘Amru bin al-’As, the Arab conqueror of Egypt
It is a cold, winter’s afternoon in the Eastern Mediterranean. The low-angled sun catches the broad lateen sails of a mighty fleet of dhows sailing north- west of the Island of Cyprus from Syria towards the coast of Asia Minor, driven across a heavy sea by a spirited southeast wind. The year is 52 in the New Calendar. The landfall of this gargantuan armada will signal plunder, destruction and death.
Half a century earlier, way to the south among the deserts of Arabia, Islam had made its first appearance at the time-honoured polytheistic cult centre of Mecca which was focussed on an ancient Nabatean temple known as the Ka’ba. One thousand Arab gods were said to inhabit the life-giving waters of the nearby sacred spring of Zamzam, among them the great mother goddess Allat. The wel