Mount Kynthos, the hill of the foreign gods

The Cyclades take their name from the circle (kyklos) they make round Delos, and from the top of Kynthos you can see why: on a clear day Mykonos, Tinos, Syros, Paros and Naxos stand round the horizon. The summit was lived on before the sanctuary existed, by a small Early Cycladic community of the 3rd millennium BC, abandoned in the 2nd. In the 6th century BC Zeus and Athena took over the top, and the foundations of their sanctuary are still there among small cairns left by visitors.

Halfway up, the Antron, a cleft in the rock roofed over with ten great granite slabs leaning together like a gable, was taken by its first excavators for the oldest temple of Apollo. Finds inside, the base of a statue with feet, a tree trunk and a lion skin, point instead to Herakles.

The terraces lower down tell the story of the free port. Merchants from Egypt built Serapeion A as a private sanctuary; two more Serapeia followed, and around 130 BC the Athenians themselves dedicated a Temple of Isis, whose façade has been raised again and in whose cella a large statue of the goddess still stands. Next door, worshippers of Hadad and Atargatis, the gods of Syria, built a sanctuary with their oldest known dedication in 128/127 BC and a little theatre of about a dozen rows for some 400–500 people, with no stage building at all.