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Lake Tritonis is a large body of fresh water in northern Africa that was described in many ancient texts. Classical-era Greek writers placed the lake in what today is southern Tunisia
Tunisia

Tunisia , officially the Tunisian Republic , is a country located in North Africa. It is bordered by Algeria to the west and Libya to the southeast....
. In details of the late myths and personal observations related by these historians, the lake was said to be named after Triton
Triton (mythology)

Triton is a mythological Greek mythology, the messenger of the deep. He is the son of Poseidon, god of the sea, and Amphitrite, goddess of the sea....
. According to them it contained two islands, which they called, Phla and Mene.

Location
The location is unclear.






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Lake Tritonis is a large body of fresh water in northern Africa that was described in many ancient texts. Classical-era Greek writers placed the lake in what today is southern Tunisia
Tunisia

Tunisia , officially the Tunisian Republic , is a country located in North Africa. It is bordered by Algeria to the west and Libya to the southeast....
. In details of the late myths and personal observations related by these historians, the lake was said to be named after Triton
Triton (mythology)

Triton is a mythological Greek mythology, the messenger of the deep. He is the son of Poseidon, god of the sea, and Amphitrite, goddess of the sea....
. According to them it contained two islands, which they called, Phla and Mene.

Location


The location is unclear. The lake is mentioned as being in Libya
Ancient Libya

Ancient Libya was the region west of the Nile Valley. It corresponds to what is now generally called Northwest Africa. Its people were the ancestors of the modern Berber people....
, a land the ancient Greeks believed encircled their world. In their knowledge, Libya extended from Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt was an Ancient history civilization in eastern North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile in what is now the modern nation of Egypt....
, the Nile Valley and its basin, to the Atlantic Ocean
Atlantic Ocean

The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's oceanic divisions; with a total area of about 106.4 million square kilometres . It covers approximately one-fifth of the Earth's surface....
 and along the south of Ancient Egypt.

Both Herodotus
Herodotus

Herodotus of Halicarnassus was a Greeks historian who lived in the 5th century BC and is regarded as the "Father of History" in Western culture....
 in the fifth century B.C. and Diodorus in the first century A.D. described the lake, Herodotus giving it an area of 2,300 km˛ (900 mi˛), or, half the size of the contemporary United States state, Rhode Island.

History


The name of the lake appears constantly in discussion of the geography related in Greek mythology
Greek mythology

Greek mythology is the body of myths and legends belonging to the Ancient Greece concerning their List of Greek mythological figures#Immortals and Greek hero cult, Cosmology#Metaphysical cosmology, and the origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices....
.

When Athena
Athena

In Greek mythology, Athena is the shrewd companion of Hero and the goddess of Hero endeavour. She is the virgin patron of Athens, which built the Parthenon to worship her....
 is addressed as Athene Tritogeneia ("born of Trito"), the archaic epithet
Epithet

An epithet is a descriptive word or phrase accompanying or occurring in place of the name of a person or thing, which has become a fixed formula....
 is explained by the episode where, having sprung fully-formed from the head—or thigh—of Zeus
Zeus

Zeus in Greek mythology is the king of the gods, the ruler of Mount Olympus and the god of the sky father and List of thunder gods. His symbols are the thunderbolt, eagle, bull , and oak....
—who had swallowed her pregnant mother to prevent his own downfall from the rule over the current Greek pantheon by her progeny, as predicted—the goddess was escorted to Lake Trito and attended to by the nymphs. A different interpretation, taking into consideration much earlier Greek and Minoan myths, leads translator Robert Graves
Robert Graves

Robert Ranke Graves was an England poet, translator and novelist. During his long life, he produced more than 140 works. He was the son of the Anglo-Irish writer Alfred Perceval Graves and Amalie von Ranke, a niece of the famous German historian Leopold von Ranke....
 to suggest that the reverse direction of religious influence occurred, with Neith
Neith

In Ancient Egyptian religion, Neith was an early goddess in the Egyptian pantheon. She was the patron Deities#Egyptian mythology of Sais, Egypt, where her cult was centered in the Western Nile Delta of Egypt and attested as early as the First Dynasty.....
 being the deity who influenced development of the Greek concept for the goddess Athene. Neith was an ancient deity when first appearing in the earliest Egyptian pantheon, and is suspected to have originated among the Berbers.

The story of the Argonauts
Argonauts

In Greek mythology, the Argonauts were a band of heroes who, in the years before the Trojan War, accompanied Jason to Colchis in his quest to find the Golden Fleece....
 places Triton's home on the Mediterranean coast of Libya. When the Argo was driven ashore on the Lesser Syrtes by a fierce storm while returning from Colchis
Colchis

In ancient geography, Colchis or Kolkhis was an ancient Georgia , state monarchy and region in the Western Georgia , which played an important role in the ethnic and cultural formation of the Georgians and its subgroups....
, the Argonauts found themselves in "an area surrounded by sands". They portage
Portage

Portage refers to the practice of carrying a canoe or other boat over land to avoid an obstacle on the water route , or between two bodies of water ....
d their ship twelve days to Lake Tritonis, but the lake water was salty and undrinkable. Since they could find no outlet from Lake Tritonis to the sea, they could do nothing. Then they propitiated the deities with a golden tripod
Sacrificial tripod

A sacrificial tripod was a type of altar used by the ancient Greeks. The most famous was the Delphic tripod, on which the Pythia took her seat to deliver the oracles of the deity....
 on the shore and Triton, the local deity, appeared to them in the form of a youth, to show them a hidden channel to the sea.

This late myth related that a lake nymph named Tritonis made the lake her home and, according to an ancient tradition, was the mother of Athena by Poseidon
Poseidon

In Greek mythology, Poseidon was the god of the sea and, as "Earth-Shaker," of earthquakes. The name of the god Nethuns in Etruscan mythology was adopted in Latin for Neptune in Roman mythology: both were sea gods analogous to Poseidon....
. (Herodotus
Herodotus

Herodotus of Halicarnassus was a Greeks historian who lived in the 5th century BC and is regarded as the "Father of History" in Western culture....
, iv. 180; Pindar
Pindar

Pindar , was an Ancient Greek Lyric poetry poet.Of the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, Pindar is the one whose work is by far the best preserved, and critics in antiquity tended to regard him as the greatest....
. Pytli. iv. 20.) By Amphithemis, she became the mother of Nasamon and Caphaurus.

Catastrophic natural disaster


At an unknown date, an earthquake collapsed dikes or the land structures that kept the lake from drying up, causing drainage to the sea of most of the fresh water and at the most allowing for a seasonal lake or marsh. It then became associated with Chott el-Djerid, a seasonal lake
Chott

The term Chott is used to denominate dry lakes in the Saharan area of Africa that stay dry in the summer, but receive some water in the winter....
 which is marshy and shallow.

This article is based partly on the entry in the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography
Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography

The Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography, first published in 1854, was the last of a series of classical dictionaries edited by the English people scholar William Smith , which included as sister works A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities and the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology....
, by William Smith
William Smith (lexicographer)

Sir William Smith , was a distinguished English lexicographer....
, LLD, 1854.

Sources