The Golden Bowl: Thoughts on the New Sappho and its Asianic Background

Abstract

Abstract The paper explores the relation between a set of poetic formulas in early Greek and Anatolian languages of the second and early first millennia having to do with the cosmography of the rising sun in macrocosm, and going up into bed in microcosm, with an eye to defending the reading and restoration έέρρωωιι δδέέππαασσ εειισσοομμββάάμμεενν(ααιι) in the editio princeps of the new Sappho. The Luvian word for ““sky, heaven,”” represented as a bowl in Hieroglyphic, is the likeliest source of the Greek word depas, Mycenean dipas, in the second millennium, together with the associative semantics of depas and ““heaven”” evidenced in Hittite and Luvian texts in the second millennium, and in early Greek poetry in the first.