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FROM NAUKRATIS, the Greek emporion in the Nile Delta,1 comes a little-noticed trio of dedicatory inscriptions showing the name "Pandemos" in the dative case.2 Two of these were brought to light by Ernest Gardner while excavating the temenos of Aphrodite during the second season of digging (1885/6) at the site:3
When in 1898 digging resumed under D. G. Hogarth, a third dedication was found, this time, in an area-one evidently given over to Aphrodite-within a building Hogarth identified as the Hellenion (cf. Hdt. 2.178.2-3), in the northeast corner of the excavations:4
For all three inscriptions, a late archaic, possibly very early classical date is reasonably secure.5 We are, then, dealing with the earliest attested instances of the epithet6-instances seemingly uninfluenced by Athens,7 home to a Pandemos whom scholars often treat as paradigmatic for Aphrodite as sponsor of civic unity at poleis throughout the Greek world.8 Yet context suggests that this model will not work for Naukratis, a locale, as we shall see, more congenial to Pandemos in a non-civic, "general-access" capacity with respect to her clientele and her connection to economic activity at the site.
Civic Pandemos?
We surmise from the shared formulary, yet varied find-context and character of these dedications (an unevenly incised ostrakon, a fairly typical Ionian cup dedication, a fine Attic vase), that the epithet in question, the only one attested for Aphrodite at the site, had achieved some degree of currency
Both names of Aphrodite [viz., Ourania and Pandemos] are old and widespread cult epithets, but the original meanings were quite different. The heavenly one is the Phoenician Queen of Heaven, and Pandemos is literally the one who embraces the whole people as the common bond and fellow feeling necessary for the existence of any state.13
This civic-integrative explanation of Aphrodite Pandemos (i.e., as sponsor of synoecism and/or political cohesion), and
Commonality
If context is to serve as any sort of guide, the place to begin is Herodotus (2.178.1-3):
Amasis, having become friendly to the Greeks, showed it in various ways to certain of them. In particular, he granted Naukratis as a polis to settle for those who came to Egypt. But to those of them who sailed but did not wish to settle there, he granted land for the establishment...