Alexander Enmann

Alexander Enmann chose the Phoenician theory of Aphrodite as the target of his doctoral dissertation, Kypros und der Ursprung des Aphroditekultus, presented at Dorpat (Tartu) in 1886¹. The theory gave the goddess a Semitic origin and made Cyprus a Phoenician colony. Enmann contested it strongly¹.

Anna Cannavò places his stance among the first and most radical reactions to the decipherment of the Cypriot syllabary and the discovery that it recorded Greek. These reactions were aimed at the assimilation of Cypriot civilisation to Phoenicia, as made by Movers, Ross and their successors¹.

Enmann was born in 1856 and died in 1903. A classical philologist, he worked chiefly on the biography of the Roman emperors, and his writing on Cyprus is a thesis, not the record of fieldwork or a collection¹. His places of birth and death are not recorded.