Already for Homer, Kinyras loomed on the eastern horizon, a Great King who treated on equal terms with Agamemnon, sending him a marvelous daedalic breastplate as a friendship-gift:

One version of the lost epic Kypria told of a broken promise by Kinyras to contribute ships against Troy, and probably how he hosted Paris and Helen on a honeymoon escapade as they evaded pursuit. [2] Alkman describes Cypriot perfume as “the moist charm of Kinyras.” [3] Pindar calls him “cherished priest of Aphrodite” whom “golden-haired Apollo gladly loved”; and refers to the “blessed fortune … which once upon a time freighted Kinyras with riches in Cyprus on the sea.” [4] Sources from the Hellenistic period onwards, when Cypriot lore entered Greek letters more directly, tell us that Kinyras was first-discoverer of copper and metallurgical operations on the island, and master of other typical industries. Local fourth-century inscriptions show that the Paphian kings traced their descent from Kinyras, and it was said that he built, and was buried in, Aphrodite’s great and ancient sanctuary there. [5] His wealth was a byword, rivaling Sardanapalos and Kroisos, and thrice surpassing Midas. [6] And, like these other eastern kings, he underwent a humbling reversal of fortune. One legend held that Kinyras was driven from power by “the Greeks with Agamemnon”: this must reflect the Aegean migrations of the twelfth and eleventh centuries, which transformed Cyprus and made it the eastern edge of the Grecophone world. [7] A second catastrophe secured imperishable fame in the western canon, thanks to Ovid: Kinyras was unwittingly seduced by his daughter Myrrha (or Smyrna); she was metamorphosed into the myrrh-tree, anointing her baby Adonis with sappy tears. [8]

These are but highlights of a long and intricate mythological life. Spare traces are widely scattered in poets, historians, philosophers, mythographers, geographers, lexicographers, and church fathers. [9] The relevant sources—never completely assembled—run from Linear B down through the Byzantine period. Some of these are Syro-Levantine traditions that made their way into Greco-Roman authors, and several Syriac texts are also related. Unique information is even found in Étienne de Lusignan, a sixteenth-century Franco-Cypriot historian who has been overlooked in all previous studies of Kinyras, whom he calls “the god Cinara(s)”; some of what Lusignan says is due to his own rationalizing composition, but he does seem to draw several times on the island’s conservative oral traditions and/or some lost ancient authority. [10]

As the foregoing sources show—and as C. Baurain emphasized in a fundamental study—Kinyras was already established for Homer and other Archaic poets as the central culture-hero of Cyprus, mythologically linked to the industries and political configuration of the pre-Greek LBA. But two further ideas, seemingly tangential to this dominant paradigm, stand out.

First, several traditions held that Cyprus was not Kinyras’ original home, which is variously located in Cilicia, Phoenicia, or Syria/Assyria. [11]

Second, a few sources make Kinyras a musician, or associate him with professional musicians. [12] Commenting on the Iliad passage cited above, Eustathios, twelfth-century archbishop of Thessalonica, asserted that Kinyras was named from the kinýra. [13] This is the ‘Greek’ word that in the Septuagint commonly renders Hebrew kinnōr, the lyre famous as the instrument of King David. [14] This etymology once seemed plausible to many. In the Golden Bough, Frazer astutely compared Kinyras to David:

But in 1965 J. P. Brown—in an otherwise valuable comparative study of Kinyras and Kothar, the Syro-Levantine craftsman god who plays a vital part in this history—influentially asserted that Eustathios’ derivation was anachronistic, an obvious conjecture for a Christian scholar steeped in scripture; he saw “no reason to believe that [kinýra] had been adapted from Semitic a millennium earlier to serve as etymology for Kinyras.” [16] But this judgment begs the question of Kinyras’ own Greekness. Despite Cyprus’s close and uninterrupted association with the Aegean from the fourteenth century onwards, [17] the island was always a world apart—and all the more so in the pre-Greek period, to which myth assigns Kinyras.

The question was transformed by a discovery from the Syrian coastal city of Ugarit, destroyed shortly after 1200 during the so-called Great Collapse that marked the end of the LBA and saw the Aegean migrations to the eastern Mediterranean (see further below). The 1929 excavations produced a tablet the significance of which was not recognized for several decades, when further finds enabled the restoration of what J. Nougayrol dubbed “le panthéon d’Ugarit.” [18] Two new and well-preserved exemplars came to light from the temple district in 1956 and 1961, one in Akkadian with the mixture of syllabic and logographic signs typical of Mesopotamian scribal traditions, the other in Ugaritic and the city’s own vowel-free cuneiform alphabet. These were published together in 1968, three years after Brown had discredited the traditional association of Kinyras and kinýra. [19]

The more informative Akkadian text provided crucial detail. The determinative d(iĝir) (Sum. ‘god’) appeared throughout, showing that this was a register of thirty-three deities. Many were familiar, like El (’Ilu), Dagan, and Baal (Ba‘lu), whose various incarnations begin the list. Some Ugaritic powers were glossed by Mesopotamian equivalents—a typical example of the divine ‘translations’ that were current in the LBA. [20] Kothar (Kôṯaru) for instance was equated with the versatile Ea (patron of music and inventor of the first lamentation-priest, among many other traditional credits). [21] Others were rendered phonetically, revealing their pronunciation more fully than the parallel Ugaritic texts. And at the end came the following: [22] In the case of the kinnāru—an early WS or areal form, cognate with both Heb. kinnōr and ‘Gk.’ kinýra [25] —d(iĝir)is followed by a second determinative, giš (‘wood’), which in Mesopotamian lexical texts classifies objects made entirely or substantially of wood, including stringed-instruments. [26] So there is no doubt that we are dealing with a physical Lyre that was somehow regarded as Divine.

This Divine Kinnaru was promptly hailed as the ancestor of Kinyras by many Semiticists, with W. F. Albright proclaiming that the “ancient derivation [of Kinyras from kinýra] … may now be regarded as certain.” [27] Actually Eustathios’ etymology, although we shall see that it can be traced back to the Hellenistic period and beyond, [28] is now ancillary. A Divine Kinnaru on the Syrian coast—which on a clear day may be seen from Cypriot Salamis and the Karpass Peninsula—demands comparison with Kinyras in its own right. [29] Musical etymology, geographical proximity, and the close political and cultural relations now documented between Ugarit and LBA Cyprus (see below) combine to make some connection seem inevitable—especially after S. Ribichini’s perceptive reconnaissance in 1982. [30]

But the precise nature of the relationship has remained obscure. What is a Divine Lyre? And how could it beget a substantially metamusical Cypriot culture-hero?

A major obstacle is the disparity between the evidence for Kinyras and Kinnaru. The former’s mythological domain can be fairly well charted from numerous Greco-Roman sources. But the Divine Kinnaru appears certainly only in a few further ‘pantheon texts.’ Baurain, while acknowledging that an etymological link between Kinyras and kinýra was not in itself implausible, rejected the idea of a ‘real’ god Kinnaru as “fort excessif,” and so declined to extend his study of Kinyras beyond Cyprus and into Ugaritian and other ANE material. [31] This is a common reaction from Classicists, for whom Greek words like theîos (‘of the gods’) or théspis (‘filled with divine voice’)—often applied in early epic diction to singers, their voices, and even their lyres [32] —make it natural to understand ‘divine’ as simply ‘sacred’, through association with Apollo, the Muses, or other gods and their cults. Yet these very words have a theological prehistory about which we are largely ignorant, and they may (once) have been more numinous than we suppose.

Be this as it may, divinized cult-objects are a well-attested phenomenon in the ANE and especially Mesopotamia, and these sources must obviously take priority over Greek literature when seeking illumination for the Divine Kinnaru. Yet Ugaritologists too have tended to see Kinnaru as ‘only an instrument’, however wonderful. For M. H. Pope, “The mind and mood altering power of music suffices to explain the divinization of the lyre” while “the determinative for wood … retains touch with reality.” [33] Similarly, M. Koitabashi wrote that “the lyre’s magical practice for manipulating the god’s feelings was a motive for its deification in ancient Ugarit.” [34]

These observations are psychologically sensitive and anthropologically relevant. But we are left with a conundrum. Where Kinyras was the center of a rich legendary cycle, the Divine Kinnaru does not certainly (n.b.) appear in any of Ugarit’s narrative or ‘paramythological’ texts (the latter combine myth and ritual [35]). And how could a physical object like the kinnāru become an actor like the versatile Kinyras?

Yet these problems are not insurmountable. Astarte herself is largely absent from such contexts at Ugarit, though the goddess was of vital importance to the city’s royal cult. [36] This parallel becomes all the more relevant given Kinyras’ persistent intimacy with ‘Aphrodite’ on Cyprus. Moreover, Mesopotamian texts provide clear evidence that cult-objects could indeed be personified and take part in mythological narratives; and there is a probable parallel from the Syro-Hurrian world. [37]

In theory, therefore, an historical connection between Kinyras and the Divine Kinnaru is perfectly possible. The real problem is to clarify and specify the historical and cultural conditions which can link these two so seemingly different figures.

From the foregoing discussion, three broad areas of investigation may be identified, corresponding to the three main Parts of this study.

Part One, The Cult of Kinnaru, begins by examining the divinization of instruments as a general pattern, especially through the rich Mesopotamian sources (Chapter 2). This will provide a comparative framework for understanding the specific case of Ugarit’s Divine Kinnaru, although Kinnaru himself must be seen as epitomizing a much broader and older Syro-Levantine lyric culture. This may be partially reconstructed, after identifying the kinnāru itself and defining the chronological and geographical limits of the material to be studied (Chapter 3), by examining the earliest sources for the instrument and select cognates, as well as the larger cultural contexts of each attestation. These case studies should be seen as random but representative samples, and are presented in chronological order: EBA Ebla (Chapter 4), OB Mari (Chapter 5), LBA cultures peripheral to the Syro-Levantine heartland of the instrument (Chapter 6), Ugarit itself (Chapter 7), and the Biblical world, with special attention to David (Chapter 8). Part One, as a whole, provides the historical and cultural background, and a collection of parallels, for interpreting Kinyras himself.

In Part Two, Kinyras on Cyprus, I first assess the quality and antiquity of traditions about Kinyras’ musicality—obviously essential for conclusively proving some historical connection with the Divine Kinnaru. I show that the Byzantine authors who are our most explicit witnesses were in fact well justified in their belief. A distinctly Cypriot lyric tradition can also be identified, and closely associated with kinýra, thanks to J.-B. Cayla’s recent recognition of an ‘Our Kenyristḗs Apollo’ at Roman Paphos (Chapter 9). This musical Kinyras can then be traced back to the fifth century BCE on the island through a close reading of a well-known passage in Pindar’s Pythian 2 (Chapter 10). To go deeper we must turn to music-iconography and map out the island’s ‘lyric landscapes’, which, it will be seen, are compatible with an early (LBA) arrival to Cyprus of the knr [38] —a precondition for the presence of Kinyras himself (Chapter 11). This provides a solid foundation for examining a further, and somewhat elusive, musical aspect of Kinyras—his association with lamentation singing and the Cypriot ‘Linos-Song’ to which Herodotos refers (Chapter 12). I then review and expand the material which allies Kinyras to the pre-Greek period—both his connections with early Cypriot industries (Chapter 13), and his pivotal role in Aegean migration legends as a cipher for the island’s various pre-Greek communities (Chapter 14). These two patterns—the early musical Kinyras and his persistent link with the pre-Greek period—can only be harmonized, I argue, by assuming that a Divine Lyre had been present on Cyprus already in the LBA. I therefore continue by exploring the cultural conditions of the LBA island and its relations with the mainland; what role a Divine Lyre could have played; and how its originally musical powers could have led to secondary, non-musical associations (Chapter 15). I then study the Kinyrad dynasty of historical Paphos, the clearest locus for continuity of the Divine Lyre’s cult across the LBA–IA transition (Chapter 16).

If Kinyras and Kinnaru are indeed historically cognate, it is only to be expected that some vestiges are also to be found in mainland traditions. I gather and analyze these extra-Cypriot traces in Part Three, Kinyras and the Lands around Cyprus. I begin by examining the two or more cases of Kinyras as a personal name at Mycenaean Pylos, and argue that these presuppose Kinyras as an established divine figure who had already acquired secondary, non-musical attributes by the thirteenth century (Chapter 17). This leads us to confront Kinyras’ relationship with Kothar (Chapter 18). Their fusion presents a particularly challenging aspect at Byblos, but also an opportunity for better understanding the time and circumstances of a Divine Knr’s arrival to LBA Cyprus (Chapter 19). I then consider a further possible mainland ‘Kinyras’ at Sidon (Chapter 20). I conclude by returning to the environs of Kinnaru himself, collecting the traditions that assert a Cilician and/or Syrian origin. These may be seen partly against the Syro-Hurrian cultural heritage of LBA Kizzuwatna—comprising the later Cilicia—and partly eighth-century Phoenician cultural influences in the same region. There is also important music-iconography, especially the well-known Lyre-Player Group of Seals; collectively these present, I argue by way of conclusion, our most comprehensive representation of the Divine Lyre (Chapter 21).

Seven Appendices document and discuss related issues whose treatment would impede the flow of argument in the main text.

Last and far from least comes a small monograph in its own right—an analytical catalogue of Mesopotamian balang-gods (divinized harps or lyres), generously contributed by Professor Wolfgang Heimpel. This work illuminates the breadth and depth of the phenomenon of divinized instruments—I refer to it repeatedly—and will be an important resource for further research.

With Kinyras we are in the unusual position of being able to reconstruct, in broad outline, the complete lifecycle of a mythological figure. Beginning as an instrument of ritual and secular music in the EBA, the Syro-Levantine kinnāru was exalted, in emulation of Mesopotamian cult practice, to a Divine Lyre by the second millennium. Coming to LBA Cyprus from one or more mainland locations, Kinyras, as the Greeks would call him, enjoyed a brilliant regal career before devolving into the human king of Greco-Roman myth. But we must always distinguish between Kinyras’ treatment in classical literary sources generally, and the situation on Cyprus itself. Ribichini’s description of the Divine Lyre as “un modello ormai superato” [39] best applies to the former. We shall see that Kinyras remained numinous on the island much longer than extra-Cypriot sources would suggest.

Cyprus, and Kinyras’ dominant connection with a specific moment of its history, are at the heart of this study. The Cypriot king mythologically delimits the pre-Greek LBA from the EIA [40] Aegean migrations. The same historical and cultural transition is equally reflected in the disjunction of sources for Kinnaru and Kinyras—the former winning elucidation from ANE texts and iconography especially of the BA, the latter compiled from Greek and Roman authors of later times, often much later. A brief historical sketch is therefore advisable. While the problems of Alashiya and the ‘Sea Peoples’ are among the most discussed and debated in Cypriot studies, they are still generally unfamiliar to most classicists (this being a period without Greek literary texts). I hope that specialists will not find this sketch too facile, especially as to the archaeological record—which, though of central importance to these questions, is far too complex to address in detail here. [41] My purpose is rather to bring out, in broad strokes, what I deem most relevant to the coming arguments (where I shall bring archaeological material to bear as specific issues arise).

It is quite universally agreed that the land of Alashiya, mentioned in ANE texts going back to the nineteenth century, is to be equated with, or located on, Cyprus. There are two decisive points. First, Alashiya is frequently associated with copper in our texts, while Cyprus was the region’s premier source of the metal. [42] Second, Cyprus is the only area of sufficient size in which to locate a further Great Kingdom (as it is styled in the Amarna letters) between Egypt, Mitanni, the Hittites, and Ahhiyawa—this last now confidently identifiable as a ‘Mycenaean’ state in the Aegean, akin to Homer’s Akhai(w)oí, ‘Achaeans’. [43] Conversely, placing Alashiya elsewhere would leave the economically vital island otherwise undocumented. [44] Recent petrographic analysis of Alashiyan diplomatic correspondence with Amarna and Ugarit [45] shows that these tablets’ clay-fabric matches samples from the southeastern Troodos—that is, near the actual copper deposits. [46] Alassa and Kalavasos thus become attractive new candidates (versus Enkomi on the east coast, near historical Salamis) for the kingdom’s main political center, at least in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries. [47] A re-evaluation of these sites’ importance had already been called for by recent excavation and theoretical models of the social landscape; both were well-situated not only for copper extraction but a “multiplicity of functions” within the island’s settlement hierarchy. [48] Nearby Paphos, an important sanctuary already in the LBA, would fit this picture well as the state’s main religious center. [49]

That Alashiya comprised much, if not all, of the island is shown by the terms of address used of and by its king in correspondence with Egypt and Ugarit. His freedom to call pharaoh “My Brother” indicates, in the period’s diplomatic parlance, his own status as a Great King—that is, politically independent, and controlling a number of lesser polities. [50] Because of this, no amount of regionalism in the archaeological record [51] should be viewed as incompatible with supralocal political control, whatever form that took. [52] The situation in Ahhiyawa may have been comparable, if the traditional portrait of Agamemnon’s loose confederation of regional kings is at all accurate. That is, the Great Kings of both Ahhiyawa and Alashiya may have presided over political structures rather less grand and rigidly controlled than the imperial giants Egypt and Hatti. Accordingly they could have been viewed as lesser players. For there does seem to be a slight air of wheedling inferiority on the part of the Alashiyan king towards his Egyptian ‘brother.’ [53] As to Ahhiyawa, there is the famous case of its ruler erased from a list of Great Kings in a draft of the Hittite treaty with Shaushgamuwa of Amurru (reign of Tudhaliya IV, ca. 1227–1209). [54] Still, Kushmeshusha, the one Alashiyan king now known by name, could address the Ugaritian ruler as “my son,” a relationship accepted by the king of Ugarit himself elsewhere. [55] While a politely condescending tone might be adopted by an older but otherwise equal interlocutor, here it was probably justified by Ugarit’s status as a Hittite subject-city. Hittite and Ugaritian texts also show that the Alashiyan king could receive deportees, another mark of Great Kingship. [56]

Alashiya was therefore no provincial backwater. Intensive material and economic relations with its neighbors are well documented both archaeologically and textually. [57] Mercantile agents and other royal protégés passed from Alashiya to Egypt and Ugarit (and elsewhere), or resided there for reasons of state and personal interest. [58] The Amarna letters contain many detailed references to the precious materials, finished products, and skilled craftsmen which were bartered and haggled over by the monarchs of Egypt and Alashiya as part of the gift-giving which characterized Great Kingship. [59] New Alashiya letters from Ugarit also confirm the longtime suspicion that, if the Cypro-Minoan script was used for internal records, the royal court also housed scribes who could execute letters in diplomatic Akkadian. [60] Alashiya’s scribes were a heterogeneous corps, with Canaanite, [61] Hurrian, and Assyrian dialect elements inflecting the Peripheral Akkadian used in the Alashiya texts, alongside fairly pure Middle Babylonian specimens; one scribe was from Ugarit itself. [62] Looking westward, the Cypro-Minoan script implies some interaction with Minoan scribes, with whose own Linear A it is related. [63]

The power and sovereignty of Alashiya waned in the later thirteenth century, with the Hittite kings Tudhaliya IV (ca. 1237–1209) and his son Suppiluliuma II (ca. 1207–1178) claiming dominion over the island following naval victory. [64] Its collapse is to be somehow connected with the chaotic age of the ‘Sea Peoples,’ the conventional term adapted from inscriptions of the pharaohs Merneptah (ca. 1236–1223) and Ramses III (ca. 1184–1152) for various groups, mainly from the Aegean and western Anatolia, who migrated to the eastern Mediterranean around this time. [65] These movements variously resulted from and/or occasioned the so-called Great Collapse of palatial society in Mycenaean Greece and the Hittite world; the destruction of various Syro-Levantine sites including Ugarit; and, according to Ramses, Alashiya itself: We may avoid the long-running—but vital—debates about the exact identity and provenance of the several groups mentioned, and the historical accuracy of Ramses’ claim to have prevailed in an epic land-and-sea showdown during the eighth year of his reign—perhaps 1177 (Figure 1). His ‘settlement’ of the ‘vanquished’ in his own lands will have included the Peleset and other groups who occupied what now became Philistia—southern ‘Palestine’, formerly under long-term NK control. [67] This probably also explains the Cypriot cities which appear elsewhere among his triumphs. [68]

It is now understood, however, that Aegean settlement on Cyprus was much more complex and long-drawn than Ramses’ inscriptions might suggest, unfolding across the twelfth and eleventh centuries. Various explanatory models have been advanced and continue to be refined. [69] But the outcome of any reconstruction must allow the island’s Arcado-Cypriot dialect of Greek—first attested by the famous Opheltas obelós (spit) from the Paphos region in the eleventh century, [70] around the same (dramatic) time that the Egyptian official Wen-Amun found that his own tongue was now practically unknown on Cyprus [71] —to emerge as the majority language by the Archaic period. [72] Thus in the Esarhaddon prism inscription (N-A, 673/672) at least half of the Cypriot kings have Greek names, and the same is probably true of others. [73] Even Amathous, where ‘Eteocypriot’ inscriptions—presumably in one of the island’s pre-Greek languages—persisted until the fourth century, had kings with Greek names. [74] Despite this linguistic situation, however, the ‘colonial’ process can no longer be viewed as unilateral ‘Hellenization.’ The Aegean influx is practically invisible in the archaeological record, to judge from which there was a fairly general blending by the tenth century, at least as regards material culture (including the revealing burial customs). [75] All the same, we shall see that a distinction between ‘Greek’ and ‘pre-Greek’ was sometimes cultivated as late as the fourth century. [76]

Another major trend was underway by ca. 900, with Phoenician groups, led by Tyre and drawn more or less by Troodos copper, settling in various places; Amathous and especially Kition were important early epicenters. [77] Formal Tyrian political control of Kition, and perhaps elsewhere, probably first emerged in the later eighth century as an extension of Assyrian provincial structure. [78] The inland sites of Idalion and Tamassos fell to Kition in the early fifth and mid-fourth centuries respectively, while rulers with Phoenician names ruled Salamis periodically under the Persians. [79] Some kings of Lapethos also had Phoenician names. [80]

This, in very broad strokes, is the historical situation as I understand it. I have elaborated the Alashiyan period most fully, as I consider this the formative age for Kinyras. My treatment of the Aegean and IA Phoenician ‘strata’ is obviously cursory; but it should suffice as a preliminary framework, into which specific developments can be fit as the argument unfolds.