The Olympian creation myth

AT the beginning of all things Mother Earth emerged from Chaos and bore her son Uranus as she slept. Gazing down fondly at her from the mountains, he showered fertile rain upon her secret clefts, and she bore grass, flowers, and trees, with the beasts and birds proper to each. This same rain made the rivers flow and filled the hollow places with water, so that lakes and seas came into being.

b. Her first children of semi-human form were the hundred-handed giants Briareus, Gyges, and Cottus. Next appeared the three wild, one-eyed Cyclopes, builders of gigantic walls and master-smiths, formerly of Thrace, afterwards of Crete and Lycia, whose sons Odysseus encountered in Sicily. Their names were Brontes, Steropes, and Arges, and their ghosts have dwelt in the caverns of the volcano Aetna since Apollo killed them in revenge for the death of Asclepius.

c. The Libyans, however, claim that Garamas was born before the Hundred-handed Ones and that, when he rose from the plain, he offered Mother Earth a sacrifice of the sweet acorn.

Mother Earth

1. This patriarchal myth of Uranus gained official acceptance under the Olympian religious system. Uranus, whose name came to mean 'the sky', seems to have won his position as First Father by being identified with the pastoral god Varuna, one of the Aryan male trinity; but his Greek name is a masculine form of Ur-ana ('queen of the mountains', 'queen of summer', 'queen of the winds', or 'queen of wild oxen') - the goddess in her orgiastic midsummer aspect. Uranus's marriage to Mother Earth records an early Hellenic invasion of Northern Greece, which allowed Varuna's people to claim that he had fathered the native  tribes he found there, though acknowledging him to be Mother Earth's son. An emendation to the myth, recorded by Apollodorus, is that Earth and Sky parted in deadly strife and were then reunited in love: this is mentioned by Euripides (Melanippe the Wise) and  Apollonius  Rhodius (Argonaution). The deadly strife must refer to the clash between the patriarchal and matriarchal principles which the Hellenic invasions caused. Gyges (' earth-born')  has  another form, gigas ('giant'), and giants are associated in myth with the mountains of Northern Greece. Briareus ('strong') was also called Aegaeon (Iliad), and his people may therefore be the Libyo-Thracians, whose Goat-goddess Aegis gave her name to the Aegean Sea. Cottus was the eponymous (name-giving) ancestor of the Cottians who worshipped the orgiastic Cotytto, and spread her worship from Thrace throughout North-western  Europe.  These tribes are described as 'hundred-handed', perhaps because their priestesses were organized in colleges of fifty, like the Danaids and Nereids; perhaps because the men were organized in war-bands of one hundred, like the early Romans.

2. The Cyclopes seem to have been a guild of Early Helladic bronze-smiths. Cyclops means 'ring-eyed', and they are likely to have been tattooed with concentric rings on the forehead, in honour of the sun, the source of their furnace fires; the Thracians continued to tattoo themselves until Classical times. Concentric circles are part of the mystery of smith - craft: in order to beat out bowls, helmets, or ritual masks, the smith would guide himself with such circles, described by compass around the centre of the flat disk on which he was working. The Cyclopes were one-eyed also in the sense that smiths often shade one eye with a patch against flying sparks. Later, their identity was forgotten and the mythographers fancifully placed their ghosts in the caverns of Aetna, to explain the fire and smoke issuing from its crater. A close cultural connexion existed between Thrace, Crete, and Lycia; the Cyclopes  will have been at home in all these countries. Early Helladic culture also spread to Sicily; but  it may well be (as Samuel Butler first suggested) that the Sicilian composition of the Odyssey explains the Cyclopes' presence there. The names Brontes, Steropes, and Arges ('thunder', 'lightning', and 'brightness') are late inventions.

3. Garamas is the eponymous ancestor of the Libyan Garamantians who occupied the Oasis of Djado, south of the Fezzan, and were conquered by the Roman General Balbus in 19 BC. They are said to have been of Cushite-Berber stock, and in the second century AD were subdued by the matrilineal Lemta Berbers. They later fused with Negro aborigines on the south bank of the Upper Niger and adopted their language. They survive today in a single village under the name of Koromantse. Garamant is derived from the words gara, man, and te, meaning 'Gara's state people'. Gara seems to be the Goddess Ker, or Q're, or Car, who gave  her name to the Carians, among other people, and was associated with apiculture. Esculent acorns, a staple food of the ancient world before the introduction of corn, grew in Libya; and the Garamantian settlement of Ammon was joined with the Northern Greek settlement of Dodona in a religious league which, according to Sir Flinders Petrie, may have originated as early as the third millennium BC. Both places had an ancient oak-oracle. Herodotus describes the Garamantians as a peaceable but very powerful people, who cultivate the date- palm, grow corn, and herd cattle.