URANOPOLIS in MACEDONIA 300BC Aprodite as Uranus Earth Globe Greek Coin i39793

Item: i39793

Authentic Ancient

Coin of:

Greek city of

Uranopolis
in

Macedon

Bronze 16mm (3.24 grams) Struck circa 300 B.C.
Reference: Sear 1475; SNG Cop. 455; SNG ANS 914;SNG Evelpidis 1363; BMC 2
Eight-rayed star, representing the sun.
OYPANIΔΩΝ ΠΟΛΕΩΣ,

Aprodite


Urania
seated facing on
globe, holding sceptre.

The name of this city and types depicted on this coin refer to

Uranus
, the
divine personification of the sky. From Hesiod (Theogony 126ff.) we know he was
produced by Gaia, became her consort, but, hating her children he caused them to
remain confined within her. Gaia in revenge instigated his castration of their
son Cronos and cast his severed genitals into the sea which engendered
Aphrodite. Uranos is very rarely named on coinage.

Founded on Mt. Athos by Alexarchos, brother of the Macedonian
king Kassander. The exact location of Uranopolis is unknown, though perhaps the
city was located on the peninsula of Athos. Uranopilis was the site of a mint in
the Kingdom of Thrace. Coins of Uranopolis are known for displaying Aphrodite
Urania sitting on a globe, the first known depiction of the earth in its actual
shape.

You are bidding on the exact item pictured,

Authenticity.

Uranus (/sjʊərənəˈ/
or

/
sʊˈreɪnəj/;
Ancient Greek

Οὐρανός, Ouranos meaning “sky”
or “heaven“)
was the primal
Greek
god personifying the
sky.
His equivalent in
Roman mythology
was
Caelus
. In
Ancient Greek literature
, Uranus or Father
Sky was the son and husband of
Gaia
, Mother Earth. According to
Hesiod
‘s
Theogony
, Uranus was conceived by Gaia
alone, but other sources cite
Aether
as his father. Uranus and Gaia were the
parents of the first generation of
Titans
, and the ancestors of most of the Greek
gods, but no
cult
addressed directly to Uranus survived into
Classical times, and Uranus does not appear among the usual themes of
Greek painted pottery
. Elemental Earth, Sky and

Styx might be joined, however, in a solemn invocation in Homeric
epic.

Etymologyy

The most probable etymology is from the basic
Proto-Greek
form *(F)orsanόj (worsanos)
derived from the noun *(F)orsό (worso,
Sanskrit
: varsa “rain” ). The relative
Proto-Indo-European language
root is *ers
“to moisten, to drip” (Sanskrit: varsati “to rain”), which is connected
with the Greek ourόw (Latin:
“urina”,
English
: “urine”, compare Sanskrit: var
“water,” Avestan var “rain,” Lithuanian jures “seas,” Old English
wær “sea,” Old Norse ver “sea,” Old Norse ur “drizzling
rain”) therefore Ouranos is the “rainmaker” or the “fertilizer”. Another
possible etymology is “the one standing high in order” (Sanskrit: vars-man:
height,
Lithuanian
: virus: upper, highest seat).
The identification with the
Vedic

Varuna
, god of the sky and waters, is
uncertain. It is also possible that the name is derived from the
PIE
root *wel: to cover, enclose (Varuna,
Veles
). or *wer: to cover, shut.

Genealogy

Most Greeks considered Uranus to be
primordial
, and gave him no parentage,
believing him to have been born from
Chaos
, the primal form of the universe.
However, in Theogony
, Hesiod claims Uranus to be the
offspring of Gaia, the earth goddess.
Alcman
and
Callimachus
elaborate that Uranus was fathered
by
Aether
, the god of heavenly light and the upper
air. Under the influence of the philosophers,
Cicero
, in De Natura Deorum (“Concerning
the Nature of the Gods”), claims that he was the offspring of the ancient gods
Aether
and
Hemera
, Air and Day. According to the
Orphic Hymns
, Uranus was the son of
Nyx
, the personification of night.

Creation myth

Greek mythology

The Mutilation of Uranus by Saturn: fresco by
Giorgio Vasari
and
Cristofano Gherardi
, c. 1560 (Sala
di Cosimo I,
Palazzo Vecchio
)

In the Olympian creation myth, as
Hesiod
tells it in the
Theogony
, Uranus came every night to cover
the earth and mate with
Gaia
, but he hated the children she bore him.
Hesiod named their first six sons and six daughters the
Titans
, the three one-hundred-handed giants the
Hekatonkheires
, and the one-eyed giants the
Cyclopes
.

Uranus imprisoned Gaia’s youngest children in
Tartarus
, deep within Earth, where they caused
pain to Gaia. She shaped a great flint-bladed sickle and asked her sons to
castrate
Uranus. Only
Cronus
, youngest and most ambitious of the
Titans, was willing: he ambushed his father and castrated him, casting the
severed testicles into the sea.

For this fearful deed, Uranus called his sons
Titanes Theoi
, or “Straining Gods.” From the
blood that spilled from Uranus onto the Earth came forth the
Giants
, the
Erinyes
(the avenging Furies), the
Meliae
(the ash-tree
nymphs
), and, according to some, the
Telchines
. From the genitals in the sea came
forth Aphrodite
.

The learned Alexandrian poet
Callimachus
^[13]
reported that the bloodied sickle had been buried in the earth at
Zancle
in Sicily, but the Romanized Greek
traveller
Pausanias
was informed that the sickle had been
thrown into the sea from the cape near
Bolina
, not far from
Argyra
on the coast of
Achaea
, whereas the historian
Timaeus
located the sickle at
Corcyra
;^[14]
Corcyrans claimed to be descendants of the wholly legendary
Phaeacia
visited by
Odysseus
, and by circa 500 BCE one Greek
mythographer, Acusilaus
, was claiming that the Phaeacians had
sprung from the very blood of Uranus’ castration.

After Uranus was deposed, Cronus re-imprisoned the Hekatonkheires and
Cyclopes in Tartarus. Uranus and Gaia then prophesied that Cronus in turn was
destined to be overthrown by his own son, and so the Titan attempted to avoid
this fate by devouring his young.

Zeus, through deception by his mother
Rhea
, avoided this fate.

These ancient myths of distant origins were not expressed in
cults
among the
Hellenes
. The function of Uranus was as the
vanquished god of an elder time, before real time began.

After his castration, the Sky came no more to cover the Earth at night, but
held to its place, and “the original begetting came to an end” (Kerényi). Uranus
was scarcely regarded as anthropomorphic, aside from the genitalia in the
castration myth. He was simply the sky, which was conceived by the ancients as
an overarching dome or roof of bronze, held in place (or turned on an axis) by
the Titan
Atlas
. In formulaic expressions in the Homeric
poems ouranos is sometimes an alternative to
Olympus
as the collective home of the gods; an
obvious occurrence would be the moment in Iliad 1.495, when
Thetis
rises from the sea to plead with Zeus:
“and early in the morning she rose up to greet Ouranos-and-Olympus and she found
the son of Kronos …”

William Sale remarks that “… ‘Olympus‘
is almost always used of [the home of the
Olympian gods
], but ouranos often refers
to the natural sky above us without any suggestion that the gods, collectively
live there”. Sale concluded that the earlier seat of the gods was the actual
Mount Olympus
, from which the epic tradition by
the time of Homer had transported them to the sky, ouranos. By the sixth
century, when a “heavenly Aphrodite” (Urania)
was to be distinguished from the “common Aphrodite of the people”, ouranos
signifies purely the celestial sphere itself.

Hurrian mythology

The Greek creation myth is similar to the
Hurrian
creation myth. In Hurrian religion
Anu
is the sky god. His son
Kumarbis
bit off his genitals and spat out
three deities, one of whom,
Teshub
, later deposed Kumarbis. In
Sumerian mythology
and later for
Assyrians
and
Babylonians
,
Anu
is the sky god and represented law and order.

It is possible that Uranus was originally an
Indo-European
god, to be identified with the
Vedic

Váruṇa
, the supreme keeper of order who
later became the god of oceans and rivers, as suggested by
Georges Dumézil
, following hints in
Émile Durkheim
, The Elementary Forms of
Religious Life (1912). Another possibility is that the Iranian supreme God
Ahura Mazda
is a development of the
Indo-Iranian
*vouruna-*mitra. Therefore this
divinity has also the qualities of
Mitra
, which is the god of the falling rain.

Uranus and
Váruṇa

Uranus is connected with the night sky, and
Váruṇa
is the god of the sky and the celestial
ocean, which is connected with the Milky Way. His daughter
Lakshmi
is said to have arisen from an ocean of
milk, a myth similar to the myth of Aphrodite. Both Lakshmi and Aphrodite are
associated with the planet
Venus
.

Georges Dumézil
made a cautious case for the
identity of Uranus and
Vedic

Váruṇa
at the earliest
Indo-European
cultural level. Dumézil’s
identification of mythic elements shared by the two figures, relying to a great
extent on linguistic interpretation, but not positing a common origin, was taken
up by Robert Graves
and others. The identification of
the name Ouranos with the
Hindu
Váruṇa, based in part on a posited
PIE
root *-ŭer with a sense of
“binding”—ancient king god Váruṇa binds the wicked, ancient king god Uranus
binds the Cyclopes—is widely rejected by those^[who?]
who find the most probable etymology is from
Proto-Greek
*(F)orsanόj (worsanos) from
a PIE root *ers “to moisten, to drip” (referring to the rain).

Vedic Indra is linked with Zeus grandson of Uranus, but according to Vedic
myths Indra & Váruna were brothers so it is possible that Indra is the
grand-uncle of Zeus and not his counterpart.^{[verification
needed]}

Cultural context of
flint

The detail of the sickle’s being flint rather than bronze or even iron was
retained by Greek mythographers (though neglected by Roman ones).
Knapped flints
as cutting edges were set in
wooden or bone sickles in the late Neolithic, before the onset of the
Bronze Age
. Such sickles may have survived
latest in ritual contexts where metal was taboo, but the detail, which was
retained by classical Greeks, suggests the antiquity of the
mytheme
.

Planet Uranus

The ancient Greeks and Romans knew of only five ‘wandering stars’ (Greek:
πλανήται, planētai):
Mercury
,
Venus
,

Mars, Jupiter
, and
Saturn
. Following the discovery of a sixth
planet in the 18th century, the name
Uranus
was chosen as the logical addition
to the series: for Mars (Ares in Greek) was the son of Jupiter, Jupiter (Zeus
in Greek) the son of Saturn, and Saturn (Cronus in Greek) the son of
Uranus. What is anomalous is that, while the others take Roman names, Uranus
is a name derived from Greek in contrast to the Roman
Caelus
.

Consorts and children

All the offspring of Uranus are fathered upon
Gaia
, save
Aphrodite
and the
Erinyes
, born when
Cronus
castrated him and cast his severed
genitalia into the sea (Thalassa).