Looking for Aphrodite. David Price Williams
narrative seeks to answer those questions. It charts the exploration of ancient Knidos, conducted during an archaeological excavation almost fifty years ago. And at the same time it’s an exploration that launched the author, who was present at the dig, on a trajectory along which he too experienced a revolution in his own way of life, just as the Knidians had done all that time ago, rejoicing in their famed statue.
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PRONUNCIATION
The Turkish words in the text are written with the Turkish phonetic alphabet used commonly in Turkish orthography. The individual letters have the following values:-
C is pronounced J, as in Cengis = Jengis or Cumhur = Jumhur
Ç is pronounced Ch, as in Çayhane = Chayhane
I without a dot is pronounced Er as in Yazιköy = Yazerkoy
Ğ in the middle of a word is pronounced silently as in olacağım =olaja’erm
Ş is pronounced Sh, as in Şerefe = Sherefe
Ü is pronounced Oo, as in Gün = Goon
David is transcribed in Turkish as Deyvit
I have used the Turkish spelling of Knidos rather than the Anglicised version Cnidus except where it is used directly or indirectly from quotations. Actually, the local Turks, not liking two consonants together, pronounce the name as ‘Kinidos’.
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CHAPTER ONE
YAZID GOES TO CHURCH
The sea is a boundless expanse whereon great ships look like minute specks; naught but the heavens above and the waters beneath. Trust it little. Fear it much.
‘Amru bin al-’As, the Arab conqueror of Egypt
It is a cold, winter’s afternoon in the Eastern Mediterranean. The low-angled sun catches the broad lateen sails of a mighty fleet of dhows sailing north-west of the Island of Cyprus from Syria towards the coast of Asia Minor, driven across a heavy sea by a spirited southeast wind. The year is 52 in the New Calendar. The landfall of this gargantuan armada will signal plunder, destruction and death.
Half a century earlier, way to the south among the deserts of Arabia, Islam had made its first appearance at the time-honoured polytheistic cult centre of Mecca which was focussed on an ancient Nabatean temple known as the Ka’ba. One thousand Arab gods were said to inhabit the life-giving waters of the nearby sacred spring of Zamzam, among them the great mother goddess Allat. The well at Mecca had been administered from time immemorial by the Quraysh tribe, yet it was from the clan of these cultic guardians that a theological luminary was to emerge who was to transform not just Mecca but the whole World. His name was Muhammad, The Praiseworthy One, of the family of Hashim.
Muhammad’s visions of the One God Allah caused consternation among the Quraysh, in particular those who profited from administering the Ka’ban faction at Mecca. They forced Muhammad and his followers to flee in fear of their lives from Mecca to the small northern town of Yathrib, later to be named Medinat un-Nabi, the City of the Prophet, in honour of Mohammad.
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The date was 622 AD, the date traditionally ascribed by Moslems to the foundation of Islam - the ‘surrendering’ to the One God. Allowing for adjustments for lunar months, fifty or so years from that date in the Christian calendar makes the date the fleet of ships with the lateen sails were sailing to the coast of Asia Minor as 672 AD.
The deadly armada is manned by Arabs. The ships belong to Mu’awiyah, one time Islamic military governor of Syria, now one of the first Caliphs and the founder of the Umayyad Dynasty and scourge of the Byzantine Emperors in Constantinople. Some twenty or more years earlier, in 649, Mu’awiyah himself had already led a successful 1,700-ship invasion fleet against the Island of Cyprus. Its Byzantine capital, Constantia, had been sacked and its population massacred to a man. Five years later, he did the same thing to the Christians on the island of Rhodes. Now he was sending his son, Yazid ibn Sufyan, named for his grandfather, as commander of a naval force raiding even further west towards the Aegean Sea, against the Byzantine settlements on the Island of Chios and the mainland city of Smyrna, today’s Izmir. This is where our story begins, or perhaps it should it be, ends.
To reach the Aegean, Yazid’s fleet must first pass through the treacherous seas off Cape Crio, the south western tip of Asia Minor where an elongated rocky peninsula protrudes abrasively into the sea lanes between the Christian Islands of Rhodes and Kos. As it attempts to round the point, the fleet, like so many before it, will probably have to heave-to for a short while to await favourable winds in the ancient harbour at Cape Crio itself, a temporary safe haven which had once served the mighty classical city of Knidos.
Let us imagine the twenty-seven year old Yazid that day in 672 AD. Yazid’s fleet, built of cedar wood from the snowy mountains of the Lebanon, their planking stitched together with leather thongs and covered with pitch from the banks of the Euphrates, has arrived in the old commercial harbour of Knidos. Since the time of Alexander the Great one thousand years earlier,
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Knidos had been a well-known and prosperous city, but the last one hundred years or so had witnessed the buildings of this once wealthy entrepôt smashed into rubble by a whole rash of earthquakes, its inhabitants ravaged by bubonic plague and its great monuments left abandoned in ruins on the hillside. News of the devastating assaults led by Yazid’s father had already sent the population of Knidos plummeting further as its maritime economy collapsed, its eastern trading prospects terminally blighted and then dashed by the depredations of these Arab raids. And now the feared Arabs had come west again, like the ultimate curse of God. This must have been the last straw. By the time Yazid arrived the people living at Knidos must have dwindled to almost nothing.
Let us follow Yazid as he climbs, for climb he surely did, up from the ancient marble quayside to view what remained of what had been a great metropolis. He must have looked out across an urban wilderness, a once thriving city in terminal decay, its temples supplanted with churches which themselves have been torn apart and tumbled in the tectonic upheavals that had recently shaken and shivered the whole region. Classical pillars lie scattered about on the ground like so many groves of felled trees. The huge terrace walls, once retained by rows of marble blocks, have burst with such ferocity that their surmounting monumental buildings have debouched onto the terraces below in a cataclysm of destruction. Houses and villas lie burnt and already overgrown, their contents long since pillaged and picked over. Its civic buildings have collapsed and been plundered decades ago. And on this day, the day of Yazid’s arrival, the very last inhabitants who had been eking out a pauper’s existence in temporary rubble hovels have already fled over the mountains the moment they saw the lateen sails on the horizon near Rhodes. They will never return. No-one ever will, not to live.
Walking up the stepped streets of this ghost town, the paving stones worn with hundreds of years of use, Yazid arrives at the Christian Cathedral of Knidos. The roof has collapsed, but the sturdy hemi-domes of the triple
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apses remain. He clambers over the rubble and enters what is left of the chancel, the church’s Holy of Holies. There, among those sacred stones, remembering the eternal efficacy of that consecrated sanctuary, the thin odour of incense perhaps still lingering in the coolness, he bends down and scratches his name on the floor, asking Almighty God to have mercy on him. The once illustrious city – with over one thousand years of celebrated history - lies dead beneath his feet. His graffiti completed, he walks down the ancient terraces from the church back to his ship to weigh anchor and sail away into ignominy. Indeed ignominy was assuredly to be his lot for it was this same Yazid who a few short years later participated in the martyrdom of Hussein ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet, at the Battle of Karbala and in so doing initiated the deadly schism between Shia and Sunni Muslims which still ferociously tears Islam asunder today. But that’s another story.
Yazid’s act of troubled piety graphically illuminates what was probably the very last day in the life of ancient Knidos, in that late winter of 672 AD. We know that Yazid climbed those steps up to the ruined cathedral, and