Sibyl. The sibyls were oracles in Ancient Greece.
The earliest sibyls, according to legend, prophesied at holy sites. Their prophecies were influenced by divine inspiration from a deity; originally at Delphi and Pessinos, the deities were chthonic deities.
In Late Antiquity, various writers attested to the existence of sibyls in Greece, Italy, the Levant, and Asia Minor. The English word sibyl comes, via the Old French sibile and the Latin sibylla, from the ancient Greek.
Varro derived the name from theobule, but modern philologists mostly propose an Old Italic or alternatively a Semitic etymology. The first known Greek writer to mention a sibyl is Heraclitus, in the 5th century BC: The Sibyl, with frenzied mouth uttering things not to be laughed at, unadorned and unperfumed, yet reaches to a thousand years with her voice by aid of the god.' Walter Burkert observes that frenzied women from whose lips the god speaks are recorded very much earlier in the Near East, as in Mari in the second millennium and in Assyria in the first millennium.
Until the literary elaborations of Roman writers, sibyls were not identified by a personal name, but by names that refer to the location of their temenos, or shrine. In Pausanias, Description of Greece, the first sibyl at Delphi mentioned was of great antiquity, and was thought, according to Pausanias, to have been given the name sibyl by the Libyans.
The earliest sibyls, according to legend, prophesied at holy sites. Their prophecies were influenced by divine inspiration from a deity; originally at Delphi and Pessinos, the deities were chthonic deities.
In Late Antiquity, various writers attested to the existence of sibyls in Greece, Italy, the Levant, and Asia Minor. The English word sibyl comes, via the Old French sibile and the Latin sibylla, from the ancient Greek.
Varro derived the name from theobule, but modern philologists mostly propose an Old Italic or alternatively a Semitic etymology. The first known Greek writer to mention a sibyl is Heraclitus, in the 5th century BC: The Sibyl, with frenzied mouth uttering things not to be laughed at, unadorned and unperfumed, yet reaches to a thousand years with her voice by aid of the god.' Walter Burkert observes that frenzied women from whose lips the god speaks are recorded very much earlier in the Near East, as in Mari in the second millennium and in Assyria in the first millennium.
Until the literary elaborations of Roman writers, sibyls were not identified by a personal name, but by names that refer to the location of their temenos, or shrine. In Pausanias, Description of Greece, the first sibyl at Delphi mentioned was of great antiquity, and was thought, according to Pausanias, to have been given the name sibyl by the Libyans.
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