Lake Tritonis

Summary

Lake Tritonis is a lake of ancient Libya, that is, North Africa, into which flows a river called Triton. The Greeks made it the birthplace of Athena, the home of Triton son of Poseidon, and the place where the ship Argo lost its way until Triton showed it the way out to the sea.

Herodotus says two Libyan peoples live around the lake, the Machlyes and the Auseans, separated by the river; the Machlyes wear their hair long behind, the Auseans in front. Every year the Auseans hold a festival for the goddess the Greeks call Athena: their maidens divide into two bands and fight each other with stones and sticks, which they say honours their native goddess as their ancestors did, and those who die of their wounds are called false virgins. Before the fight the people choose the fairest girl, arm her with a Corinthian helmet and a full Greek panoply, set her in a chariot and drive her round the lake. They say Athena is the daughter of Poseidon and Lake Tritonis, that she quarrelled with her father and gave herself to Zeus, who made her his daughter. Herodotus says all the Libyans sacrifice only to the sun and moon, except those who live around the lake, who sacrifice first to Athena, then to Triton and Poseidon.

The story of the Argonauts gathers at the lake. Herodotus tells that Jason carried a bronze tripod in his ship, meaning it for Delphi, but the wind carried him to Libya; he ran into the shallows of the lake and found no way out, and Triton appeared, asked for the tripod and promised to show him the channel. Jason gave it, Triton showed him the way out, set the tripod in his own temple and prophesied that if any descendant of the Argo's crew took it away, a hundred Greek cities would rise around the lake; so the people of the country hid it. Pindar tells how a god in the likeness of a man, calling himself Eurypylus, son of Poseidon, met the Argonauts at the lake's outflow and gave the hero Euphemus a clod of Libyan earth as a guest-gift; Medea said the clod was a pledge that Euphemus's descendants would rule that broad land, and when it was washed into the sea at Thera, his line had to come out of that island generations later to found Cyrene. Apollonius of Rhodes has the Argonauts carry their ship on their shoulders for twelve days across the desert to the lake, where they find no outlet; they set Apollo's tripod on the shore, and Triton appears to them as a youth, gives Euphemus the clod, points out the lake's deep mouth and the narrow passage between the breakers, then takes hold of the ship's keel himself and guides it to the sea, a man above and a sea-monster's tail below.

The idea the lake's stories turn on is that it is a door between two lands. There the Greeks find the Libyans' goddess whom they call Athena, say she was born there before she became Zeus's daughter, and take her dress from the women of Libya. Herodotus says the Greeks copied Athena's robe and aegis from Libyan women, who wear over their clothes goatskins dyed red with tassels of hide; the thongs became snakes in Athena's images, and the name of the skin, αἰγέη, became the name of the aegis, αἰγίς. He adds that the ritual cry at sacrifices came from Libya and that the Greeks learned four-horse driving from the Libyans. He also says the Egyptians did not know Poseidon's name, and that the Libyans alone have had it from the beginning and always honoured him. And the Argonauts leave the lake only when its lord shows them its mouth, taking from it a clod of earth that pledges a land their sons will rule.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the project's essays do not read Triton. The Greek is Τρίτων, Tritōn, and the lake is Τριτωνίς, Tritōnis, "Triton's". The -ōn is a Greek ending, leaving t-r-t, which we read as Arabic turʿah: t and r as they are; ʿ drops in Greek, which has no letter for it; and the final t is the feminine t that appears when the word is joined to another, turʿat-. In Lane, turʿah is the mouth of a streamlet where its water flows out of the river, a channel cut to a garden, the opening of a watering trough where the water enters and people draw it, and a door. That is what Triton is in the story: the lord of the water who knows the lake's mouth, who shows Jason the channel in Herodotus and points the Argo's heroes to the outlet in Apollonius, and whose lake is Libya's door to the sea.

Linguistic Root

Hesiod says Triton is the son of Amphitrite and Poseidon, owns the depths of the sea and lives with his mother and father in their golden house; he calls Athena Tritogeneia, the goddess born from Zeus's head. LSJ explains Triton as the son of Poseidon, later in the plural the Tritons, sea gods with fishes' tails, and gives no origin for the name. In the Eumenides Aeschylus says Athena may be in the Libyan land by the waters of Triton, the stream of her birth. So in all these witnesses the name turns on water going out and coming in: a river flowing into a lake, a lake with a mouth to the sea, a lord of the depths.

The sounds: Greek τ answers Arabic t, r answers r, and ʿ drops in Greek as it did when ʿanbar became ἄμβαρ, in the Juthoor table. The feminine ending is written h in pause and pronounced t when the word is joined, and the Greek name keeps it as t, as Hebrew keeps the feminine t in the construct. The reading's limit is that it makes the feminine ending part of the name's stem, and that Hesiod's Triton is lord of the whole sea, not of one mouth.

Key Mythic Narratives

Heracles's spring and the Hesperides

Apollonius sets the garden of the Hesperides and its guardian serpent Ladon near the lake, in "the garden of Atlas". The Argonauts arrive parched and find the serpent killed by the arrows of Heracles, who passed the day before; the nymphs tell them he struck a rock near the Tritonian lake with his foot, and water gushed out, and he drank from it like a beast of the field. Two Argonauts die in Libya: Canthus, killed by a shepherd, Caphaurus, son of a Tritonian nymph, defending his flock; and Mopsus the seer, bitten by one of the snakes born from the blood of Medusa's head when Perseus carried it over Libya.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Plato says the city of Sais in the Egyptian Delta was founded by a goddess whose Egyptian name is Neith, and whose Greek name, its people say, is Athena. So the Greeks make Athena a Libyan goddess at the lake and an Egyptian goddess at Sais, two places at the edge of the Libyan desert. The Amazigh essay has Atlas holding up the sky at the western end of the earth, and in Apollonius his garden lies near the lake.