Two Toponymic Puzzles

Abstract

I. Nemesos-Limassol imassol, the port in Cyprus, has had many names in its day, and the changes which they have undergone seem never to have been satisfactorily set forth or explained. The object of this note is to present the existing material, so far as it is known to the writer, in the hope that more competent philologists may solve the problems it presents?. The place does not go back to a very remote antiquity, the oldest remains recorded there being of the early Graeco-Phoenician age." It is not mentioned by Strabo or by Ptolemy. If we could trust the Life of St. Auxibios,3 Tychicos I was consecrated to the see of Neapolis (which, as we shall see, was the place with which we are concerned) in the time of St. Paul; but the history in its present form is not earlier than the fourth century after Christ, and a detail like this may be still later. Nor is it mentioned by Hierocles (about 535) or by Georgius Cyprius (in the time of Phocas, 602-6I o). The chief city of the region was then still the very ancient Amathus, and it was long before it was found that the future Limassol had a better roadstead. Nevertheless by the fifth century, long before the time of the last two authors mentioned, it had begun to be of sufficient importance to be an episcopal see; for it was represented at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 by its bishop Soter.4 Then, however, it was known as Theodosias or Theodosiana.5 It may be presumed that it took that name out of compliment to Theodosius II. How long it bore it we do not know; but the author of the life of St. Spyridon just quoted had to explain it as another name for Neapolis-the "new city" which was to supersede the neighbouring Amathus, although that place was to linger on, gradually decaying, as the seat of a bishop until the twelfth century. The most famous bishop of Neapolis was Leontios (about 590-668), the author of some remarkable popular biographies. It has been said that a bishop of Neapolis was present at the seventh (second Nicene) General Council in 787, but this is a mistake.,6 So far we have found no name for Limassol which could have developed