New Online from the CHS: Kinyras: The Divine Lyre

John Curtis Franklin, Kinyras: The Divine Lyre

 

Kinyras, in Greco-Roman sources, is the central culture-hero of early Cyprus: legendary king, metallurge, Agamemnon’s (faithless) ally, Aphrodite’s priest, father of Myrrha and Adonis, rival of Apollo, ancestor of the Paphian priest-kings (and much more). Kinyras increased in depth and complexity with the demonstration in 1968 that Kinnaru—the divinized temple-lyre—was venerated at Ugarit, an important Late Bronze Age city just opposite Cyprus on the Syrian coast. John Curtis Franklin seeks to harmonize Kinyras as a mythological symbol of pre-Greek Cyprus with what is known of ritual music and deified instruments in the Bronze Age Near East, using evidence going back to early Mesopotamia. Franklin addresses issues of ethnicity and identity; migration and colonization, especially the Aegean diaspora to Cyprus, Cilicia, and Philistia in the Early Iron Age; cultural interface of Hellenic, Eteocypriot, and Levantine groups on Cyprus; early Greek poetics, epic memory, and myth-making; performance traditions and music archaeology; royal ideology and ritual poetics; and a host of specific philological and historical issues arising from the collation of classical and Near Eastern sources. Kinyras includes a vital background study of divinized balang-harps in Mesopotamia by Wolfgang Heimpel as well as illustrations and artwork by Glynnis Fawkes.

List of Figures

Preface

Conventions and Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Kinyras and Kinnaru

Part I: The Cult of Kinnaru

2. Instrument Gods and Musician Kings in Early Mesopotamia: Divinized Instruments

3. The Knr

4. Starting at Ebla: The City and Its Music

5. Mari and the Amorite Age: The City and Its Music

6. Peripherals, Hybrids, Cognates

7. Kinnaru of Ugarit

8. David and the Divine Lyre

Part II: Kinyras on Cyprus

9. Kinyras the Kinyrist

10. Praising Kinyras

11. Lyric Landscapes of Early Cyprus

12. Kinyras the Lamenter

13. The Talents of Kinyras

14. Restringing Kinyras

15. Crossing the Water

16. The Kinyradai of Paphos

Part III: Kinyras and the Lands around Cyprus

17. Kinyras at Pylos

18. The Melding of Kinyras and Kothar

19. Kinyras, Kothar, and the Passage from Byblos: Kinyras, Kinnaru, and the Canaanite Shift

20. Kinyras at Sidon? The Strange Affair of Abdalonymos

21. Syro-Cilician Approaches

Appendices

Appendix A. A Note on ‘Balang’ in the Gudea Cylinders

Appendix B. Ptolemy Khennos as a Source for the Contest of Kinyras and Apollo

Appendix C. Horace, Cinara, and the Syrian Musiciennes of Rome

Appendix D. Kinyrízein: The View from Stoudios

Appendix E. The ‘Lost Site’ of Kinyreia

Appendix F. Theodontius: Another Cilician Kinyras?

Appendix G. Étienne de Lusignan and ‘the God Cinaras’

Balang-Gods, Wolfgang Heimpel

Bibliography