Atlas

Summary

Atlas is a Titan of Greek myth who holds up the sky at the western edge of the earth, and whose name became the name of the great mountain of North Africa. Hesiod says in the Theogony that he is the son of Iapetus and Clymene, daughter of Ocean, the brother of Prometheus, Epimetheus and Menoetius, and that he holds up the wide heaven with his head and unwearying arms, standing at the borders of the earth before the Hesperides, the daughters of evening, because Zeus assigned him this lot. He stands at the gate of the house of Night, where Night and Day meet on the bronze threshold and greet each other; when one goes in, the other comes out.

His story turns on who carries the weight and who gets free of it. In the Library ascribed to Apollodorus, Heracles is set to fetch the golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides, and Prometheus advises him not to go himself but to send Atlas. Heracles holds the sky in his place, and Atlas goes and brings back three apples, then refuses to take up his load again and says he will carry the apples to the king himself. Heracles says: hold the sky a moment while I put a pad on my head. Atlas lays the apples on the ground and takes the sky, and Heracles picks up the apples and leaves. Apollodorus, Library 2.5.11. Ovid tells how Perseus, having killed Medusa, asked Atlas for a night's lodging; an old oracle had warned Atlas that a son of Jupiter would strip his golden trees, so he drove Perseus away, and Perseus held up the head of Medusa. Atlas became a mountain: his beard and hair forests, his shoulders and hands ridges, his head a high peak, his bones rocks, and the gods set the heaven with all its stars to rest on him.

Then the Greeks reached Libya and found the mountain. Herodotus says that in inner Libya, by a hill of salt and water, there is a mountain called Atlas, slender and round on every side, so high that its peaks cannot be seen, for clouds lie on them summer and winter; the people of the country call it "the pillar of heaven", and the people who live by it are named Atlantes after it, eat no living creature and see no dreams in their sleep. Strabo says that the Greeks call the mountain Atlas and the natives call it Dyris.

The idea his story turns on is that the sky does not stand by itself: at the end of the earth someone stands who holds it off the ground. The Odyssey says so: Atlas holds the tall pillars that keep earth and heaven apart. So when the Greeks saw in the far west a mountain whose summit vanished into the clouds and which its people called "the pillar of heaven", the giant and the mountain became one, which is what Ovid tells when Atlas turns into a mountain. Many lines of descent run back to Atlas: his daughters are the Pleiades, among them Maia, mother of Hermes, and Hesiod says in Works and Days that the rising of the Pleiades, daughters of Atlas, is the sign for harvest and their setting the sign for ploughing; and his daughter Calypso kept Odysseus on her island.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The Greek is Ἄτλας, Atlas; its final s marks the nominative, and Aeschylus has the accusative Ἄτλαν, Atlan. What remains is a-t-l, which the Greek Semitic-reading essay reads from ʿaṭal and from aṭalla. Arabic ʿ drops in Greek, which has no letter for it, leaving a vowel in its place, and ṭ becomes t. In Lane, ʿaṭal is the body or person, like ṭalal; one says mā aḥsana ʿaṭalahu, "how fine his tallness and just stature!"; ʿaṭila is said of a man who grew large in body; and ʿayṭal is tall, said also of a tall hill. In Lisān al-ʿArab, aṭalla ʿalayhi is to look down on something from above, and al-Rāghib explains aṭalla fulān as "his figure, ṭalal, rose above", that is, his person. On this reading Atlas is the tall one standing who overlooks with his figure from on high, which is what he is in both stories: a giant standing at the end of the earth, and a mountain whose head is hidden in cloud.

Linguistic Root

The Greek lexicon derives the name from a euphonic a- and the verb τλάω, to bear or endure, so that Atlas is "the enduring bearer". The Arabic reading takes the same letters, a-t-l, from ʿaṭal and aṭalla, and meets the Greek lexicon in the image: the one who stands and carries. In the Juthoor table of Greek correspondences ʿ drops or becomes a vowel at the start of a word, as Arabic ʿanbar became Greek ἄμβαρ, and ṭ answers τ. The comparison's one limit is that the Greek stem is Atlant-, and its final n and t have no counterpart in ʿaṭal; Aeschylus's short form drops the t but keeps the n.

In the lexicon the roots ʿ-ṭ-l and ṭ-l-l meet on one sense: ʿaṭal is the person, and ṭalal is also the person, and what stands up of the remains of a dwelling, its plural aṭlāl being used too for high places. Lane gives taṭālla as stretching one's neck or standing on tiptoe to look at something far off, and Abū ʿAmr says at-taṭāllu is looking down from above a place. The Greek Semitic-reading essay finds another sense in ʿaṭal, being idle and halted under a weight, as though the punishment had stopped him; in Lane taʿṭīl is leaving a thing without work or keeper. Hesiod says Atlas stands "immovably" holding up the sky, so the two senses meet in the one who stands and does not leave his place. The essay compares Atlas with Mount Qāf of Arabic tradition, the mountain that holds up the sky, and reads the name Atlantis from ṭalasa, to efface: the effaced land.

Key Mythic Narratives

Pliny's mountain

Pliny the Elder describes the mountain as he heard it from earlier writers: it rises from the middle of the sands into the sky, rugged and bare on the side facing the ocean, shaded with forests and watered by springs on the side facing Africa; none of its inhabitants is seen by day, and a silence lies on it that fills those who approach with awe; it rises above the clouds close to the orbit of the moon, and at night it glitters with fires and fills with the revels of Aegipans and Satyrs and the sound of pipes, drums and cymbals; writers say Heracles and Perseus laboured there.

Where was the garden?

Apollodorus says the apples of the Hesperides were not in Libya, as some say, but on Atlas among the Hyperboreans in the north, and that in another version Heracles picked the apples himself after killing the guardian serpent. The storytellers disagreed about where Atlas stood as they disagreed about where the garden was, until the name settled on the mountain in the far west of Africa.

Symbolic Reading

The Amazigh rereading essay reads Atlas as a literal geographical description: the giant who holds up the sky is the mountain that holds up the clouds, and "holding the sky" describes peaks that seem to touch the clouds. It says that Atlas in Amazigh is adrar, mountain, and glosses it "the support, the bearer". In the ancient accounts the natives' name for the mountain is Dyris or Addiris, and adrar means mountain throughout Amazigh, as Chaker records, so the mountain was named by its own people as "the mountain", and by the Greeks after the giant who holds up the sky. Herodotus has the point where the two meet: the people of the country themselves call it "the pillar of heaven".

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Egyptian Shu stands between his children and lifts the sky, Nut, off her brother the earth, Geb, with his arms, opening the air in which people live; Hesiod's translator Evelyn-White compares him with Atlas. In Norse myth the gods made the skull of Ymir into a sky over the earth with four corners and set a dwarf under each corner. All three hold the sky off the earth; the difference is that Shu is a father parting his children, the dwarfs are craftsmen at work, and Atlas is a punished Titan allotted the load. The mountain that holds the sky is an image gathered under the sacred mountain. Theogony, Evelyn-White's notes; Gylfaginning 8.