In ancient times, the people of the Greek city-state of Athens regarded the goddess Athena as their patron. The special relationship between the goddess and the city is reflected in their shared name, and, naturally, many people have assumed that the Athenians named their city in honor of Athena. Startlingly, however, historical and linguistic evidence may support the opposite conclusion: that the goddess Athena derived her name from the city of Athens, rather than vice versa.
Athens: a very ancient city
To understand the relationship between Athens and Athena, one first needs to understand Athens’ long history. A continuous settlement has existed at Athens’ location since at least the late fourth millennium BCE, and it first emerged as a major city during the Mycenaean Period (lasted c. 1750 – c. 1050 BCE). Athens’ origins are not just ancient compared to modern cities but even compared to many other ancient Greek cities.
During the Bronze Age, the Athenian akropolis (i.e., the large, fortified hill in the center of Athens on which the Parthenon now stands) housed a Mycenaean citadel. During this period, the inhabitants built a fortification wall of Cyclopean masonry around the akropolis, remains of which can still be seen on the akropolis today. One of the best-preserved sections of this wall lies on the south side of the Propylaia, behind (east of) the Temple of Athena Nike.
To find the answer to our question, we must look to the very oldest surviving Greek textual and archaeological sources, which date to the early period of Athens’ emergence as a city.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons by Mark Landon showing a well-preserved section of the Mycenaean fortification wall on the Athenian akropolis east of the Temple of Athena Nike
The Linear B texts and Mycenaean Greek religion
The oldest surviving texts in the Greek language are clay tablets that date between c. 1450 and c. 1200 BCE and are written in a syllabary script known as Linear B. All the surviving texts in Linear B are administrative records, and they are concerned with dry matters of accounting. Although the Mycenaean Greeks certainly told myths about their deities, none of the extant Linear B tablets describe any of these myths. Nonetheless, some tablets do record offerings made to certain deities. Consequently, these tablets preserve the names of many of the deities whom the early Greeks worshipped.
The tablets frequently mention a goddess who is called 𐀡𐀴𐀛𐀊 (“po-ti-ni-ya”) or Potnia, which means “Mistress.” Some Linear B tablets distinguish different forms of the goddess Potnia associated with different cities or domains. The English classical scholar John Chadwick, who played a role in the initial decipherment and translation of Linear B, compares this to how modern Catholics distinguish forms of the Virgin Mary associated with particular locales by calling her “Our Lady of” such-and-such, as in “Our Lady of Guadeloupe” or “Our Lady of Fátima” (Chadwick 1976, 93).
This is significant because the oldest surviving attestation of Athena as the name of a goddess occurs in a Linear B tablet that was found in the Room of the Chariot Tablets at the site of Knossos on the island of Krete; the tablet in question uses the form of her name 𐀀𐀲𐀙𐀡𐀴𐀛𐀊 (“a-ta-na po-ti-ni-ya”), which could either mean “Mistress Athena” or “the Athenian Potnia.”
ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons of a fresco fragment from the Cult Center at Mycenae dating to the thirteenth century BCE depicting a goddess (possibly Athena) wearing a boar’s tusk helmet and holding a miniature griffin, now held in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens
Toponyms and theonyms
An additional clue to the connection between Athens and Athena lies in the name Athens itself. The oldest attested form of this name is Ἀθήνη (Athḗnē). This is the form that is used throughout the Linear B tablets and the Homeric epics. Later ancient Greek sources, however, pluralize the name by calling the city Ἀθῆναι (Athênai), which is the plural form of Ἀθήνη. The same shift from singular to plural occurs in the names of several mainland Greek cities (e.g., Athḗnē → Athênai, Mykḗnē → Mykênai, and Thḗbē → Thêbai) at about the same time in the Early Iron Age.
Later, in the Byzantine Period, the name switched back to the singular, which is the reason why, in Modern Greek, the city is called Αθήνα (Athína). English has followed the classical pluralized names, which is the reason why the English names Athens and Thebes both have the plural ending -s.
The eminent scholar of Greek religion Walter Burkert points out that the ending -ēnē regularly occurs in Greek toponyms (e.g., Athḗnē, Mykḗnē, Messḗnē, Mytilḗnē, Kyrḗnē, Priḗnē, etc.), but it rarely occurs in personal names (Bukert 1985, 139). In independent publications, the American archaeologist of the Aegean Bronze Age Thomas G. Palaima and the Dutch linguist Robert S. P. Beekes also agree in identifying the toponym Athḗnē as most likely of Pre-Greek origin and the goddess’s name as most likely derived from the toponym (Palaima 2008, 352; Beekes 2010, 29).
The question of whether Athena’s name comes from Athens or vice versa is still open, and new evidence or arguments on this subject may change my perspective, but, based on the currently available evidence, I do think that the hypothesis that the goddess’s name derives from the city is the stronger of the two.
I think that a fairly strong case exists that Athena originated as the local Athenian form of the Panhellenic goddess Potnia whose worship spread to other cities during the Bronze Age. If this is correct, then the cult of the Athenian Potnia must have spread quite early, since the tablet mentioning her comes from Knossos on Krete (across the Aegean Sea from Athens), and it dates very early; the archive from the Room of the Chariot Tablets at Knossos is probably the oldest surviving archive of Linear B texts in existence, dating to the Late Minoan II Period (c. 1470 – c. 1420 BCE).
(This blog post is an expansion of this answer I originally wrote in response to a question in r/AskHistorians.)
Works cited
- Beekes, Robert S. P. 2010. Etymological Dictionary of Greek. Brill.
- Burkert, Walter. 1985. Greek Religion. Harvard University Press.
- Chadwick, John. 1976. The Mycenaean World. Cambridge University Press.
- Palaima, Thomas G. 2008. “Mycenaean Religion.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Aegean Bronze Age, edited by Cynthia W. Shelmerdine, 342–361. Cambridge University Press.
Yay! A new “Tales of Time Forgotten” post. :-). Thank you also for the citations fir further reading.
Thank you Spencer, I hope all is well with you and school is progressing well.
I’m sorry I haven’t been posting very often. As I’m sure you can imagine, I have been extremely busy with my first semester of law school. I’ve also continued reading historical scholarship and classic literature in what little free time I have, which has made me even busier. Ever since the start of the semester, I’ve been averaging a book a week for personal reading on top of my law school reading assignments. I am also still working on my novel, although progress on it has been slow lately.
So far, I am surviving law school. My attitude toward it varies from day to day. Some days, I find myself surprisingly enjoying myself, while, other days I feel like I’m dying, but I suppose that’s life. I don’t really know how well or terribly I am doing because law school grades are based almost entirely on the final exam, which we haven’t taken yet.
Glad to hear you are surviving at least.
Thanks for the interesting read, and I look forward to your novel.
What books have you read for enjoyment lately?
The following is a list of the works of significant length that I have read completely for enjoyment/edification since August of this year:
Literature and fiction: the Poetic Edda (of which I had previously read some poems), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (Parts I and II), Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Christabel” (for the fourth time), the Gospel of Thomas (which I had previously read multiple times), the Protoevangelium of James, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (which I had also previously read multiple times), the Gospel of Peter, the Apocalypse of Peter, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (for the second time), Sophus Helle’s translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh (for the third time), Sophus Helle’s translation of the hymns of Enḫeduana (for probably the fifth or sixth time), and William Hansen’s translations of ancient Greek and Roman ghost stories in his Book of Greek and Roman Folktales, Legends, and Myths (which I’ve read so many times that I’ve lost track).
Nonfiction: Emerson W. Baker’s A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience, Jonathan Gienapp’s Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique, Stuart Banner’s The Most Powerful Court in the World: A History of the Supreme Court of the United States, Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, and Eric H. Cline’s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.
I have started reading (but have not yet finished) Bettany Hughes’s The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life (which has been on my bookshelf for probably a decade at this point and which I have previously skimmed or read parts of, but, until now, have not read all the way through), Kit Heyam’s Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender, and The Federalist by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay (which I started reading this summer and have been slowly working my way through).
This is just a list of the books I’ve read since August that I can remember off the top of my head. I’ve definitely read other stuff that I can’t think of right now.
This is fascinating, and seems to give some weight to the idea that ancient peoples worshipped a single, overarching goddess who came in different versions. I’ve been resistant to this idea, as it seems reductionist and plays into versions of paganism constructed merely as mirror images of male monotheism.
Still I’m intrigued to learn more about this Potnia if more evidence arises.
Thank you for this interesting article Spencer. I hope your legal studies are going well.
The idea that all goddesses worshipped in all ancient cultures were really different forms of a single, overarching, great goddess doesn’t really find support in contemporary historical scholarship. Ancient peoples certainly worshipped many different goddesses, who had different origins, domains, personalities, myths, iconographies, and associated ritual practices. Most ancient people, in most cases, clearly regarded goddesses as being distinct from each other. Most ancient Greeks in the Archaic and Classical Periods, for instance, clearly believed that Athena, Aphrodite, Demeter, Hera, Artemis, etc. were all separate and distinct goddesses.
Nonetheless, ancient polytheistic religions were naturally syncretic. Ancient peoples often identified minor or local deities as being local forms of deities whose cults were more widespread and prominent. For instance, the Aiginetans identified their local goddess Aphaia with Athena; meanwhile, the Spartans identified their local goddess Orthia with Artemis. Ancient peoples also frequently identified foreign deities as being forms of deities from their native cultures who shared similar domains or attributes. For instance, when Greeks visited Egypt, they equated the Egyptian god Thoth with their own god Hermes, the Egyptian god Osiris with their own god Dionysos, and the Egyptian goddess Neith with their own goddess Athena.
In some cases, ancient peoples weren’t sure which of their own native deities with whom to equate a certain foreign deity, so different authors equated the same foreign deity with different deities from their native pantheon. For instance, ancient Greek sources most commonly identify the Phrygian mother goddess Kybele with Rhea, the mother of the Olympian deities, but various Greek sources also sometimes equate her with Artemis, Aphrodite, Demeter, Hera, Gaia, and/or Hestia.
The idea that all goddesses are really just local manifestations of a single great goddess does appear in ancient literature, but it is a very uncommon, eccentric position that is markedly at odds with mainstream perceptions of the time. In perhaps the most famous, striking, and baffling example of this, in Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis’s second-century CE Latin novel The Golden Ass 11.5, when the goddess Isis appears to the narrator-protagonist Lucius in a miraculous epiphany, she says to him (in Jack Lindsay’s translation):
How fascinating; I should really read Apuleius at some point!
Reminds me also a little of the famous Saitic inscription cited by Plutarch: “I am all that has been, and is, and shall be, and my robe no mortal has yet uncovered”
I highly recommend reading The Golden Ass! It is both a wild, fascinating read and an invaluable primary source on mystery religions in the Roman world, especially the cult of Isis.
Nice to be able to comment here again (only the WordPress higher-ups know why, but comments get on posts here after a month, so I can’t comment at all if there have been no posts in over a month), and good luck with law school.
As to this post, of course in ancient times they thought Athena was real. People back then were unsure whether the goddess was named for the city or vice versa, but for those who thought the city was named first, did they think Athena wasn’t called that before the city existed? I’d expect them to think the gods were older than humanity, but I feel like I could be wrong. I know that Greek myths came in many different versions by different people and were by no means all consistent with each other.
This was incredibly helpful, detailed and nuanced. Thank you!
A possible Athena fresco depiction in Odysseus’s favourite head gear?
*please let this be true!*
Great to hear from you; always a pleasure coming here.
The fresco fragment is definitely real, but whether it depicts Athena is an open question. We know from Linear B texts that the Mycenaean Greeks worshipped Athena, and the fresco fragment fits well with Athena’s known later iconography as a warrior goddess, but the fragment is not labeled, so we cannot be certain which figure it is meant to depict.
Thank you for your comment. It’s always a pleasure to hear from my readers.
Interesting post! I thought about the famous story of deciding whether the name of the city will go to Athena or Poseidon, where Poseidon gifted the horse and Athena the olive tree. Is there any archeological evidence that the god Poseidon appears around the same time as Athena, and if so is it possible that this name also comes from some ancient city?
Hope you’re doing well in law school and best of luck.
Poseidon’s name is attested in Linear B tablets from both Knossos and Pylos, including in the same tablet that mentions Athena. Zeus, Poseidon, and Potnia appear to have been the most prominent and widely worshipped Mycenaean deities, judging from the number of times they are mentioned in the tablets. Interestingly, the Linear B tablets also mention goddesses named Diwia and Posidaeia, who are apparently female versions or counterparts of Zeus and Poseidon respectively.
The etymology of Poseidon’s name is debated, but there is no evidence to suggest that it derives from the name of an ancient city. There was a Greek city in southern Italy called Poseidonia, but that city was founded as a colony around 600 BCE, and it was certainly named after the god Poseidon, since Poseidon’s name is attested in Linear B around eight hundred years before the city’s founding.
Good detective work! So, it seems that the city which the Western world regards as its point of origin was founded by pre-Indo-Europeans. I had to look up ‘Potnia’ to make sure your translation of this word as mistress meant the female equivalent of master, not unmarried lover.
What do you make of this: https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/harvard-scientists-say-ancient-carthaginians-were-genetically-closer-to-greeks-than-phoenicians
Do you think many Greeks over the centuries migrated to Karthage, perhaps for its relative prosperity as compared to Greece or those we think of as Greeks mostly an pre-Greek population which became dominated by an invasive, Greek minority, or something else?
Thank you for the positive feedback. I can, however, claim no credit for any of the “detective work” in this post, since none of it is my own. I have simply read and repeated what scholars in the field have written.
In response to your question, I would recommend treating all broad claims about ancient populations based on genetic evidence with caution, for reasons I discuss in this post I wrote four years ago. DNA studies are only as good as the samples they rely on, and the surviving ancient remains from which DNA evidence has been extracted are generally problematic. The sample sizes for the DNA of ancient populations are generally small, we usually possess extremely little or no documentary evidence about the vast majority of ancient individuals from whom DNA has been extracted (meaning it is often impossible to know how a person whom archaeologists have labeled “Greek,” “Carthaginian,” or whatever would have identified, let alone how their parents and grandparents would have identified, or where they came from originally), ancient DNA often has contamination issues, and the researchers who conduct DNA studies on ancient populations are often unfamiliar with the work that other scholars have done on how ancient peoples constructed race and ethnicity.
In the case of the Phoenicians specifically, the term “Phoenician” is a Greek exonym. The people whom we call “Phoenicians” had no sense of a shared cultural and ethnic identity as such; instead, each Phoenician identified by their home city-state. Thus, a citizen of the city-state of Sidon identified as a Sidonian, a citizen of Tyre identified as a Tyrian, a citizen of Byblos identified as a Byblian, and so forth; no Sidonian saw himself as sharing a larger ethnic or national identity with a Tyrian or a Byblian. The Greeks were the ones who lumped all Tyrians, Byblians, Sidonians, etc. together under the label of “Phoenicians.”
When it comes to the Greeks, scholars basically now agree that the Greek cultural and ethnic identity formed in Greece itself. Scholars do use the term Pre-Greek to refer to languages that were spoken in Greece before the arrival of the speakers of the Indo-European Proto-Greek language, but the terms “Pre-Greek” and “Proto-Greek” describe languages, not ethnicities. The speakers of Proto-Greek who first arrived in Greece were not yet Greeks; we do not know how they thought about themselves ethnically. They developed a sense of shared identity as Greeks while living in Greece itself, in contact with speakers of so-called “Pre-Greek” languages. Many words from Pre-Greek languages passed into Greek (which is the primary way we know about them), and many descendants of speakers of Proto-Greek languages adopted the Greek language and identity and became Greeks, in much the same way that the speakers of Proto-Greek became Greeks.
For instance, the Minoans, who lived on the island of Krete in Aegean, most likely spoke a Pre-Greek non-Indo-European language, but, after the Mycenaean Greeks from the mainland seem to have conquered them, the Minoans’ descendants eventually adopted the Greek language and became Greeks. Meanwhile, the Mycenaean Greeks of the mainland adopted Minoan deities and aspects of Minoan culture, and, in time, those features of Minoan culture became part of the definition of Greekness.
Thus, while we can speak intelligibly about “Pre-Greek” and “Proto-Greek” languages, we cannot clearly distinguish between “Greeks” and “Pre-Greeks” as enduring cultural or ethnic identities.
Thank you for your cautions about D.N.A. tests on ancient skeletons. I reject your view on ethnicity. As far as I can tell, ethnicity has been one of the most stable notions in history. Kinship has been a basis of community, castes, and ruling classes and remains a common preoccupation. You know that Greek developed from a proto-Indo-european root and that genetic studies of existing populations as well as the less reliable skeletal remains confirms population replacement in most parts of Europe.
You always take the conventional, current views of historians. That’s fine and normal, but I think you would do well to be a bit more skeptical about same. I hope your law schooling is going well.
Makes sense. Athena probably is connected to the Minoan sun goddesses so it stands to reason that her classical name is derived from the city of Athens.
Spencer, one thing relating to ancient Greece I’ve been wondering about is this: We often hear/read the Riddle of the Sphinx today as “What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening” or the like. Yet in ancient times it was “ What is that which has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?”, as mentioned by Apollodorus (https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0022%3Atext%3DLibrary%3Abook%3D3%3Achapter%3D5%3Asection%3D8). Of course the gist of the riddle is the same, as is the answer, but I still wonder when the change from mentioning one voice to mentioning times of day occurred. This 19th-century book (https://books.google.ca/books?id=DalNAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA123&dq=Riddle+sphinx&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&ovdme=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjI8u-BoNyQAxWY4skDHTYgBb0Q6AF6BAgPEAM#v=onepage&q=Riddle%20sphinx&f=false) gives the modern version with the times of day, although it goes on to mention Oedipus cutting the Sphinx’s head open, which I don’t think is in any ancient sources (is it?).
Unfortunately, I do not currently know when the modern version of the riddle first appeared; I have not researched this question, and I do not have time to research it right now, but I may look into it later when I have time.
Thanks for the answer and for approving my comment. It may be a small difference in the riddle that I brought up, but even small differences between things can be fascinating.
I agree!
I submitted a comment about the Riddle of the Sphinx to this article a week or so ago, and it had a link in it so it needed to get approved. I don’t want to be impatient, but I hope my comment gets approved before comments close on this article.
Sorry, I must not have seen your comment. I have now approved it.
Apologies for the unrelated comment; I’m reading through your earlier posts and this is the only one I can comment on.
On reading your post about Sappho’s supposed husband, and the extreme degree of uncriticality it implies about some ancient writers, would the following sequence of events — possibly playing out over centuries — sound plausible?
1) For whatever reason it becomes background knowledge for the audience that silphium has become completely unavailable (possibly [incorrectly] believed to be extinct).
2) Comedian: “If you only have sex after eating silphium, you will not have children.”
3) Scholastikos 1: “It is said that silphium [is/was] a contraceptive.” [Could a writer of Greek or Latin drop the “be” here, making the tense ambiguous?]
4) Scholastikos 2: “Silphium was a contraceptive. What a pity it went extinct!”
You may have already read my blog post about silphium, but, if you haven’t, I would recommend reading it. I would say that the sequence of events you have described here is not likely, because our sources for silphium are of quite a different nature from the sources about Sappho’s alleged husband “Kerkylas of Andros.”
The first ancient author we know of who describes silphium as a contraceptive is Pliny the Elder (lived c. 23 – 79 CE) who describes the emperor Nero (ruled 54 – 68 CE) as having eaten the last known stalk of silphium from Kyrenaika. Pliny the Elder was actually alive during the reign of Nero, which means we have every reason to believe that, when he tells us that silphium has contraceptive properties, he is accurately reporting a belief that at least some Romans held during the time when silphium was still available. The belief he reports may be wrong, but there is no reason to doubt that people actually held that belief, and there is certainly no reason to think that he is getting the claim about silphium being a contraceptive from a comic playwright.
The report about Sappho’s alleged husband, on the other hand, comes from a source that is much more significantly temporally removed from the figures it describes. Specifically, the claim that Sappho had a husband named “Kerkylas of Andros” only appears in one source: the Souda, which is a Greek-language encyclopedia compiled in the tenth century CE that is well known for uncritically relying on dubious sources.
Pliny the Elder, for all his various faults as a source, was at least alive at the time when people were harvesting and consuming silphium, whereas the compiler of the Souda lived over a millennium and a half after Sappho died.
It is also worth emphasizing that the Souda is a particularly extreme example of an uncritical source. Not every ancient author was an uncritical as the compiler of the Souda.