CALENDAR 13 MONTH

Figure 28. Cypro-Phoenician symposium bowl from Idalion, ca. 825. New York, MMA 74.51.5700. Drawn from PBSB Cy3.

Figure 33. Cypro-Phoenician symposium bowl, before ca. 725. Olympia, Greece. Athens NM 7941. Drawn from PBSB G3

This is the story about how the apple-tree (melus) took its name in Greek (mêlon/mâlon). A certain Melus, born in the island of Delos, forsook his homeland and fled to the island of Cyprus where at that time Cinyras was king, having Adonis as his son. Cinyras bade Melus be a friend to his son, and when he saw that Melus was of a good nature, gave him one of his relatives to marry, called Pelia [< Gk. Péleia], who was herself a devotee of Venus. From them was born [sc. another] Melus, whom afterwards Venus, being gripped by love for Adonis, ordered to be raised among her altars as if he were the son of her beloved. But after Adonis was killed by the wound from the boar, the senior Melus, unable to endure his grief for the death of Adonis, hung himself from a tree and so ended his life. It is from this man’s name that the apple-tree is so called. And his wife Pelia died in turn by hanging herself in this tree. Venus, driven by pity for their death, established perennial mourning (luctum) for Adonis, turned Melus into the fruit-tree of his own name, and transformed his wife Pelia into a dove. As to the younger Melus, who alone survived of Cinyras’ line, when Venus saw that he had reached manhood, she ordered him to gather a band of men and return to Delos.[65]

The recurrence in these tales of an angered or grieving Aphrodite is striking in view of the Mesopotamian charter-myth that Enki created the lamentation priest (gala/kalû) to assuage Inanna’s grief.[66] It can hardly be coincidence that Kinyras is the personification of the knr, defined as the ‘divine Inanna-instrument’ in second-millennium Mesopotamian scribal tradition; and that versions of this instrument, including the Cypriot kinýra, are associated with lamentative contexts (see further below).