The Birth of Venus

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What you see now is a detail of Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus". A beautiful painting, one of my favorites!

According to Roman mythology, Venus was born as a full grown woman out of the sea. This was actually the result of - it may sound strange, I warn you - Uranus' genitals falling into the sea and fertilizing the water. In case you might ask why his genitals fell in the first place - and here I warn you again - well, his son Cronus chopped them off!

In reality, Venus arrived in Rome from the east. The Romans had borrowed her from the Greeks, who were calling her Aphrodite, but the goddess had her origins even further to the east. According to the Ionian historian Herodotus, the Greeks had borrowed her from the Phoenicians. In fact, she was known as Astarte in the Levant and as Ishtar in Mesopotamia. The Sumerians, creators of the first Mesopotamian civilization, called her Inanna. From Mesopotamia to Rome, quite a journey huh?!

I wonder why there is no sign of the goddess in her native lands nowadays. Might it be that she has fled the violence as well?