Talk:Athena

RfC Athena's Lake Tritonis origin

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Should the recent Edit on the native origins of Athena and her birthplace in Lake Tritonis as per Greek sources from Apollodorus of Athens, Hesiod, Pausanias' description of Delphi, Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus and and research articles from Gabriel Camps and Stephen Gsell, be included as seen in this version: (17:37, 16 September 2024‎) or reverted back to the original version (current version) ?

Vote 1 : Edit is kept (Athena's birthplace in Lake Tritonis in North Africa and her early native origins) as per Potymkin

Vote 2 : Edit is removed (No mention of the lake Tritonis birth story) NebY

Potymkin (talk) 10:49, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

Comments

Vote 1. Naively, content appears accurate and not unreasonably sourced. Also I'm not sure what is the motivation for the RfC. Can you say more about why you believe either the content (or its removal) might be contentious? Ford MF (talk) 11:30, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

directly above this RfC is the talk concerning the matter, NebY recently removed sourced content I added on the lake Tritonis and native origins of athena according to greek sources, The Wikipedia discussion centers around the removal of sourced content from an article about the mythological origins of Athena. The original poster Potymkin (me) argues that the content was removed without consensus, even though it cited well-known ancient sources (Diodorus, Herodotus, Pausanias, and Pindar) and modern scholars (Gabriel Camps). The discussion highlights five key points:

Historical Relevance: Ancient sources like Herodotus and Pausanias are foundational to understanding Greek mythology, and removing them undermines the discussion of Athena’s origins.

Modern Scholarship: Gabriel Camps' research provides credible insights into potential North African influences on Greek mythology, contributing to a more comprehensive perspective on Athena's origins.

Balance of Perspectives: The removal reduces the diversity of views in the article, potentially compromising Wikipedia's neutral point of view.

Reliable Sources: The removed sources are valid and respected within historical and archaeological scholarship, per Wikipedia’s guidelines.

Engagement with the Community: Significant changes should be discussed openly to ensure accuracy and consensus.

Opposing views by NebY challenge the accuracy and interpretation of these sources, arguing that primary sources like Herodotus have been misinterpreted or misconstrued. The debate also touches on Wikipedia’s guidelines around original research, neutrality, and reliable sourcing, with NebY emphasizing that exceptional claims require strong evidence and that the cited sources do not clearly support the claim of Athena’s North African origins. Potymkin (talk) 11:44, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

• (Summoned by bot) Procedural close very limited WP:RFCBEFORE took place, and Potymkin's replies are near-entirely AI-generated text, raising clear concerns about their ability and willingness to collaborate productively on Wikipedia. Failing that, Vote 2, as the edit under discussion shows minimal understanding of key principles of Wikipedia's guidelines such as WP:LEAD, WP:WEIGHT, and WP:RS, and a lack of desire from Potymkin to learn even when given links to the guidelines. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 12:58, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

  First of all I am only replying here insofar as to inform you WP:NPA it is wikipedia policy as per WP:AFG to assume good faith, accusations that my replies are AI generated is serious as well as personal attacks against me for lack of desire from Potymkin to learn even when given links to the guidelines. I was the sole party to initiate talk here on this article's talk page (Talk:Athena#Removal of sourced content) on the matter in full accordance with wikipedia conflict resolution policy after sourced verifiable content was removed without discussion as per yourtheir ability and willingness to collaborate productively.

  in full accordance with protocol to establish content in this article I followed through to ask the community on their output concerning the recent removal of content from this article page. Potymkin (talk) 13:22, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

  This edit is entirely AI-generated, as any detection website will tell you; please do not insult your own intelligence by pretending it is not. You now seem to be on your way to initiating an arbitration request; once again, you jump steps. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 14:17, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

  your accusations are unfounded, and violate wikipedia's policy to assume good faith. if you do not wish to contribute to the current RfC you are free to allow the wide community to contribute their opinion on the matter through RfC. an Arbitration case has been opened against you for sabotaging an ongoing RfC on the article as well as the personal attacks from your last comment. Potymkin (talk) 14:22, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

  Unfortunately, I am a part of the wide community and have chosen to contribute to the RfC. Quite often on Wikipedia, people disagree with you; disagreement is not sabotage, and you should learn to deal with that fact before you end up off Wikipedia. As this is rapidly becoming a distraction to this talk page, I will not be replying further here. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 14:33, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

• Option 2. Potymkin seems to be misreading the sources that they are citing. The Pausanias text is not saying that Athena comes from Lake Tritonis, but that the belief that she had grey/blue eyes is Libyan (Or, on second reading, the even less strong claim that there existed a Libyan myth which explained the fact that Athena was described as having blue/grey eyes). The Loeb translation reads But when I saw that the statue of Athena had blue eyes I found out that the legend about them is Libyan. For the Libyans have a saying that the Goddess is the daughter of Poseidon and Lake Tritonis, and for this reason has blue eyes like Poseidon. Similarly, my reading of Camps' article is not that he says that Athena came from Lake Tritonis, or that Herodotus believed that Athena came from Lake Tritonis, but that Herodotus reports that at lake Tritonis there was a festival of a goddess identified with Athena (assimilée formellement à Athéna) who Camps later in the paragraph refers to as "the Libyan Athena". At any rate, even if Camps were arguing that the Greeks believed Athena to have come from Lake Tritonis, as NebY argues above this would not be a mainstream view and it would be undue to include it, and doubly so to state it as uncontroversial fact as in Potymkin's preferred revision. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 17:57, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

• Option 2, per Caeciliusinhorto's well reasoned argument. I also agree with a procedural close --Brocade River Poems (She/They) 20:07, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

• Option 2. The edits in question do not represent the mainstream depictions of Athena in Greek mythology, and thus do not belong in the lead. A thorough article will of course represent a wider spectrum of beliefs and traditions than that, but in appropriate sections or subsections, and without synthesis of sources to support claims that are not coherently made by any of them. It is certainly appropriate to cite the claims of Greek writers, whether they are characterized as historians, geographers, mythographers, or anything else. But only for what they actually say—not for novel combinations of material, presented as though it represented widely-held views. Anything that requires interpretation must come from secondary sources. And it is always important to cite sources in context, rather than cherry-picking those sources that support specific views and omitting other, perhaps better-known accounts. I'm not going to get into the procedural aspects of this argument, except to say that I have always found NebY to be quite reasonable in editing, and willing to consider other people's viewpoints. I would hesitate to disregard his opinions without strong and unambiguous reasons, and I'm not seeing those here. P Aculeius (talk) 10:47, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

• Option 2, or simply closure. The proposed edit was a complete mess; primary sources, original research, source misinterpretation/falsification. Several experienced users who had the patience to go through the sources have already pointed this out. Piccco (talk) 14:56, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

• Procedural close or Option2. Procedural close as above and because OP has been indefinitely blocked and then socked, lost TPA access and had their UTRS request rejected. Option 2 as detailed by others in this discussion and by myself in Talk:Athena#Removal of sourced content. OP's response there continued to cherry-pick from their only secondary source (Camps in Encyclopédie Berbère), ignoring Camps's une déesse assimilée formellement à Athéna - a goddess assimulated to Athena - and conclusion "Nît, Ashrat, Tanit, Athéna, chacune de ces déesses présente avec les autres de telles analogies qu’il est difficile de préciser leurs relations exactes" - it's difficult to be precise about their exact relationships to each other. OP (Potymkin) appears completely unaware of the Greek habit, stemming from their belief in their own religion, of believing that any deities that anyone else worshipped were in fact the deities of Greek religion in different guises (see Interpretatio graeca). OP has preferred instead to assert by cherry-picking primary sources and extraordinary reasoning to assert that deities were Libyan (cf Neith, the protracted Wikipedia:Dispute resolution noticeboard/Archive 249#Neith and subsequent editing against its outcome[1]) and even that the Greeks thought Hyperborea, the far north, was in Libya,[2] and this attempt to supersede classical Greek beliefs about Athena with a claim that the Greeks believed something entirely different was part of that distortive campaign. NebY (talk) 15:30, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Semi-protected edit request on 31 October 2024

Convert "aegis" in the symbols section to Aegis, with a link ArtemisDay (talk) 12:13, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

I've linked the earliest mention of the word in the article, which is in the "Pallas Athena" section. Is this what you were requesting? If you mean in the infobox, the term is already linked there. – Michael Aurel (talk) 00:18, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

 Already done M.Bitton (talk) 01:27, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

"Minoan" origin

Under the "Origins" section, the article mentions a reading of a "Minoan" inscription as "a-ta-no-dju-wa-ja". However, this reading does not appear to be accepted by scholarly consensus, nor is it accompanied by a citation. Jasasarame (talk) 17:17, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Athena equivalents

Since the Goddess Athena has been equated with Isis by Plutarch I think we should put it in the article. Given that Neith is there another goddess equated with Isis. A side note would love to add other deities equated with Athena similar to Aphrodite with the source as a reference. Сяра (talk) 19:11, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

Feel free to add any reliably sourced content to the article's body. I assume you're referring to the infobox, though. Any information presented in the infobox (especially equivalencies) should, per MOS:INFOBOXPURPOSE, be discussed in the article's body, be accompanied there by unambiguous sourcing, and be significant enough to Athena to be considered a key fact about her. Regarding Aphrodite's article, those equivalencies have been removed from her infobox because they aren't discussed in the article. – Michael Aurel (talk) 01:33, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

Plutarch's De Iside et Osiride from J. Gwyn Griffiths I think could be used as a source Сяра (talk) 19:30, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

Assuming you're referring to Moralia 376 A, that only indicates that the Egyptians identified the two (or that they referred to Isis as "Athena"), not that the Greeks did. – Michael Aurel (talk) 01:00, 13 February 2025 (UTC)

Tritonis

Under Tritonegeia is someone able to add a reference to Book 2 Line 226 of the Aeneid where the twin serpents that attacked Laocoon retreat to the "citadel of savage Tritonis" Whenever I try to add this the browser crashes Sulpicia Rufae (talk) 21:50, 6 March 2025 (UTC)