Uncovering the Truth: Greek Myths | BBC Timestamp | BBC Studios

Added: 2026-06-10

[00:00:02]This fearsome abyss has been hollowed out over thousands of years by the rivers, and it drops straight down hundreds of feet.

[00:00:12]>> [music] >> It's still known in Turkish as Gehennem.

[00:00:18]That's Gehenna or hell in Muslim and Christian tradition. And it really would be hell now to try to get to the bottom.

[00:00:30]>> [music] >> Fortunately, heaven doesn't require a climbing rope. It's a few hundred meters from hell, where stairs [music] lead down into a ravine.

[00:00:42]In ancient times, [music] saffron crocuses grew here, objects of cult for the ancient Hittites.

[00:00:52]Modern Turks named this place Cennet, heaven.

[00:00:57]But beyond heaven is the underground lair of a monster.

[00:01:10]One of the stories we have of the Hittite snake monster is that at first it defeated the storm god Tarhunt, then stole his eyes and heart, which he hid in a cave.

[00:01:26]In later Greek myth, Zeus too is defeated at first by the snaky monster in Greek, Typhon, on Mount Casius itself, we're told.

[00:01:35]And Typhon cuts away the god's sinews using an adamantine sickle, wraps them up in a bearskin, and conceals them in his lair, the Corycian cave.

[00:01:46]If we consider the story in its real context, we can understand for the first time how and when the story passed to the Greeks and then grew.

[00:01:58]>> [music] >> Visible beyond the remains of this Christian church is the Corycian Cave of the Greek myth.

[00:02:10]>> [music] >> At its mouth, there's actually an inscription which identifies it.

[00:02:21]Although it dates from some 600 years after the Greek Dark Ages.

[00:02:29]>> [music] >> To protect it from damage, it has been concealed.

[00:02:33]And its location is known only to the cave's [music] Turkish guardian, Ghazi.

[00:02:39]He's agreed to uncover it for me. I'm the first scholar to see it in years.

[00:02:46]In 1896, an inscription was reported here. It's absolutely thrilling. We've managed to find it again. As far as I can see, beautifully cut Greek lettering. This really is the lifeblood of ancient history. This is what we rely on and we're finding it straight in front of us.

[00:03:02]And it looks as though it's a lines of verse by one Euphemus, who is in the dells of and the the cave.

[00:03:15]We'll have to wait till the lines are clearer.

[00:03:19]After a couple of hours of digging, all four lines of verse are revealed.

[00:03:25]Weary of going into the [music] depths, Euphemus wrote his verses and had them inscribed on this beautifully dressed stone.

[00:03:35]And what he tells us is so important [music] for fixing its context. He tells us how I honored and propitiated the gods Pan and Hermes. Now, that's immensely important because in the story, precisely Pan and Hermes are the gods who rescue the stolen sinews of Zeus. So, this is the cave certainly where it happened.

[00:03:58]And he calls it Ein Arimois in Arima, a name which is going to be so important for our Greek travelers, but which also ties up with the Hittite place name here Arima on the map.

[00:04:13]And he describes how he entered the depths which are echoing with the sounds of the streams of the river Aarus.

[00:04:21]So, when he was in the bottom, he heard the echoing noise of a river. This is the most unlikely of sites. How did you ever come to discover there were things to excavate here?

[00:04:30]>> It was an accidental finding of this site when a worker found a very interesting specimen of a an Epariyon. And >> That is an ancient horse, isn't it?

[00:04:42]>> It is an an ancient three-toed horse.

[00:04:45]>> Evangelia Tsoukala is a paleontologist.

[00:04:48]With her team, she's been excavating this hillside near Mende.

[00:04:55]And has made some remarkable discoveries.

[00:04:58]>> I can show here a very extraordinary bone.

[00:05:02]>> Yeah. It's the biggest thing I've ever seen. Yeah.

[00:05:05]>> It is a femur of a mastodon.

[00:05:07]>> Oh my goodness. What is it?

[00:05:09]>> It is an ancestor of the mammoth.

[00:05:11]>> Ah, right. I mean, if I look at it knowing nothing, I might think this was the bone of some enormously heavyweight human.

[00:05:18]>> The imagination of the layman is incredible. And I have an example from my excavation in Grevena with the huge mastodons there. And the people there thought that they would become from an elephant from a circus.

[00:05:34]>> From a circus? And they just escaped?

[00:05:36]But you persuaded them.

[00:05:37]>> [laughter] >> After 20 years, yes.

[00:05:43]>> This hillside has already produced many other giant prehistoric bones. They must have been a race of gigantic people.

[00:05:50]What I'm thinking is that the Greeks, the Euboeans, who had been out in Naples and had seen the shattered remains of the battlefield where the gods had zapped the giants with thunderbolts, I can now understand why they come up here and they think this is the camp. This is where the giants bred, where they lived.

[00:06:08]Once you see it, you can see what the Euboeans concluded. These things are far bigger than me. They're proof. The poets knew. These are giants. And this is why the whole story is partly located here and partly located on the smoldering volcanoes in Italy.

[00:06:24]I think it was possibly here that a really important lesson was learned.

[00:06:30]Somewhere, one day, an inquisitive Euboean sat with a Phoenician and looked and listened while the Phoenician wrote out the letters of his script and described them.

[00:06:42]And the Greek adapted them and copied them down as letters still in use in the modern Greek alphabet. Alpha, beta, gamma.

[00:06:50]Exactly the order which we know Phoenicians used for their own letters, aleph, bet, gimel. The Greek thought he needed signs for the vowel sounds he was hearing, so he added them, epsilon, iota, and so forth, making the fullest alphabet, the one which is most easy to read. And it's that Greek alphabet that is the ancestor of all the alphabets we still use in the modern West.

[00:07:22]As the alphabet developed, myths could eventually become more fixed as they were written down.

[00:07:29]But during the Greek Dark Ages, they were still told orally and open to influence.

[00:07:36]On Cyprus, we can follow this happening to the story of a local fertility goddess.

[00:07:44]Like other visitors to Amathus, Euboeans encountered her shrine.

[00:07:50]Her worship here dates as far back as the 2000s BC.

[00:07:55]Through contact with visitors from the Near East, she then took on a wilder sexual identity.

[00:08:03]And then, when the Greeks arrived, she became Aphrodite.

[00:08:10]Jacqueline Karageorghis has spent her whole life studying the transformations of the goddess of love.

[00:08:19]>> When the Greeks came to the island in the in the 12th century BC, it seems they found the oriental goddess and they adopted her because we don't know that they had any Aphrodite in their in their context.

[00:08:31]>> of love and sex is in fact, for the Greeks, uh an introduction in the early Dark Ages.

[00:08:38]>> Yes, and it seems that the Greeks have changed her from her sexual aspect to the aspect of a goddess of love, of beauty. They Beauty is a very Greek element.

[00:08:50]>> You're making this Greek Aphrodite sound as though she lived in Paris. She's sexy and all the rest of it. But, Jacqueline, there are said to have been prostitutes here serving the cult of the goddess, at least by Christian sources. Do you believe that?

[00:09:03]>> Well, in order to say that was a ritual in Cyprus. He says that girls had to come once in their lifetime to the temple to to to offer their virginity to the goddess.

[00:09:15]>> And then they kept the money as their dowry, is that right?

[00:09:17]>> It was a way of of having a an income. I suppose this is why the sanctuary were so rich.

[00:09:23]>> And nowadays, the fathers build them a house.

[00:09:25]>> [music] >> To the west of Amathus is another place >> [music] >> now associated with Aphrodite.

[00:09:34]It is known as the Rock of Aphrodite.

[00:09:37]And the local story is that if you swim all the way round this rock, [music] you are blessed with eternal beauty.

[00:09:48]The beach alongside is now considered [music] the location of Aphrodite's literal emergence.

[00:09:57]Of course, the story of Aphrodite is connected to much grander stories in heaven, Jacqueline. When father heaven is castrated, of course, warm white sperm flies everywhere.

[00:10:07]And according to the Greeks, when the sperm falls down into the sea, somebody very significant is born from it. Your goddess, Aphrodite. And the Greeks, when they later thought about it, tried to connect that name Aphrodite with that own Greek word "aphros", meaning foam or foaming white sperm.

[00:10:27]Do you think there was any historical truth in that?

[00:10:30]>> I don't think it's the real etymology of the name, but it's very clever way of explaining Aphrodite, very poetical one.

[00:10:36]>> Right. Like a word play.

[00:10:38]>> Oh, yes. Like a word play.

[00:10:39]>> That was a pretty good way to be born.

[00:10:42]But there is the local story, when she was born, she was washed to this very beach. This is what the Cyprus Tourist Board still tells you nowadays, Jacqueline. Do you think there was any history in that?

[00:10:53]>> Well, this is a very recent tradition >> Of >> to associate this beach with Aphrodite.

[00:10:57]We don't have any proof that it was the real place where she where she came on land in Cyprus. Although ancient said that they could see her footprints on the beach, but which beach? We don't know. I have been through travelers' books and to find references to this special beach, but I could not find any reference to >> When is the first thing, do you think?

[00:11:19]>> Well, I could say during the last 50 years.

[00:11:21]>> But it shows beautifully how what will be a myth, I'm sure, continued in modern Cyprus, begins and starts from a beautiful landscape, and then acquires a force of its own, exactly as it did in the ancient world. This is how myths are made. Here, in the storerooms of the Eretria Museum, the shelves are crammed with boxes full of objects excavated by the Swiss School of Archaeology.

[00:11:47]These finds have given us a clearer picture of the lives of our Euboean travelers and the culture in which the myths we will trace were born.

[00:11:58]>> Okay, Robin. I wanted [music] to show you here two sherds with the graffiti.

[00:12:03]>> What's early writing?

[00:12:04]>> Writing, early writing. They were found in the Sanctuary of Apollo.

[00:12:06]>> Yes.

[00:12:07]>> The first one is dated from the end of the 9th century or the 8th century. We can see four letters.

[00:12:14]>> Well, they're not Greek.

[00:12:15]Um I can't understand them. What are they?

[00:12:17]>> No, they're Semitic.

[00:12:18]>> Good heavens. So, this is at the turning point when some Near Easterner has either taught a Euboean to write or um Euboean is um copying what he's learned perhaps in the Near East.

[00:12:30]>> Absolutely. But it was carved on a Euboean pot. This is a typical Euboean >> Right. Drinking cup.

[00:12:35]>> Well, right at the start of the origin of writing.

[00:12:37]>> Mhm.

[00:12:38]>> Um extraordinary. Yes.

[00:12:40]>> And at the end of the series >> Mhm.

[00:12:42]>> we have again a graffito carved on a local pot, Euboean, with another four letters.

[00:12:49]>> I I think I can read this. Hera >> Herakles >> Herakles, yes. Um four four Greek letters. So, what we have is real moment of transition. We have uh somebody trying to write Greek in a non-Greek alphabet.

[00:13:01]And then we have Greek written in the real Greek alphabet. This is an enormous important change. This is really at the root of all Western civilization. I mean, the Greek alphabet, we have then the Roman alphabet, the Etruscan alphabet, our alphabets. If they couldn't write, we wouldn't know anything about them. If they couldn't write down Homer, we wouldn't be able to read his poems. We wouldn't know anything about Hesiod. This is a real change for people and we're witnessing it in the palm of your hand.

[00:13:27]Incredible.

[00:13:28]>> Now, I want to show you these two seals which belong to the liar player group.

[00:13:33]Five of them were found in the sanctuary of Apollo. They were found in the northern sacrificial area and where cult is established, cult linked with women.

[00:13:42]>> So, this is like a calling card for Euboean women. Well, I know.

[00:13:46]>> Yes, absolutely. Talking about Euboean women in the 8th century, we have here the neck of an amphora.

[00:13:52]>> Oh, there they are. Dancing. Yes, or it's a procession. And they're holding garlands, it looks like, in these very trendy skirts. They've had to breathe in and for the painter anyway.

[00:14:01]Tight waists, long skirts, 8th century BC fashion. Wonderful.

[00:14:06]>> This is part of a crater, Robin, where you have the typical Euboean 8th century iconography.

[00:14:12]>> Right.

[00:14:12]>> With a horse.

[00:14:13]>> Spindly legs. Yes, there he is, the four-legged friend.

[00:14:16]And these aren't farm animals, are they, Silver? They don't pull carts. They can't, they haven't got the right collar.

[00:14:22]These horses they use for competition and above all for war. It's a sign of social distinction. It's not just they love animals.

[00:14:30]You're smart, you're a nobleman, you're one of the horse breeders, the local cavalry. Wonderful.

[00:14:35]>> Now, this was found in the west quarter in Eretria. That's a very important find and it's a monumental amphora.

[00:14:45]>> Right, which stood then by a grave, would that be right?

[00:14:48]>> Exactly.

[00:14:48]>> And I can see a chariot.

[00:14:50]It's a sort of chariot race or on this bit there's somebody They're they're trying to jump on off and on the back of the chariot.

[00:14:58]>> The apobates.

[00:14:59]>> Yeah, this is a sort of Greek game they play where the skill is to jump onto a chariot when it's moving and jump off the back of it.

[00:15:04]>> Probably during funerary games.

[00:15:06]>> Fantastic.

[00:15:26]>> Mhm.