British award-winning historian Bettany Hughes was recently in Cyprus filming for a documentary.

The new series of Channel 4’s Bettany Hughes’ Treasures of the World, will bring us more historical escapism and will highlight the archaeological treasures of Cyprus.
And this is good news to the ears of the Mediterranean island’s tourism key players who are concerned over the consequences from the war in Ukraine on the British market.
Bettany has previously taken us on a European tour exploring ancient treasures and recent historical finds in places such as Greece, Gibraltar, Malta and Italy. Her previous shows such as The Nile: Egypt’s Great River with Bettany Hughes, A Greek Odyssey With Bettany Hughes, Eight Days That Made Rome and Pompeii’s Final Hours: New Evidence, all made ancient history highly accessible for everyday viewers.
The popular TV history professor’s new series promises once again to show us her fascinating insights into how the world used to live thousands of years ago plus some pretty cool historical facts and sites.
In September 2020, Bettany released her book Venus and Aphrodite: A Biography of Desire, a brisk and incisive cultural history of the mythological goddess of love.
She traces Aphrodite’s origins to intersex fertility symbols in Copper Age Cyprus, her transformation in Greek and Roman mythology into a “laughter-loving” goddess often seen gazing into a mirror and emerging from sea shells, and her influence on Christian iconography of Mary, the mother of Jesus.
Hughes enriches her wide-ranging analysis with images of archaeological findings and artworks by Botticelli, Rubens, and Titian. Readers learn that the female sex symbol derives from a combination of Aphrodite’s mirror and the Christian cross, and that prostitutes were once called Venuses.
Venus and Aphrodite: A Biography of Desire brings together ancient art, mythology, and archaeological revelations to tell the story of human desire, whilst Hughes explains why this immortal goddess continues to entrance us today.
Bettany Hughes is an award-winning historian, author and broadcaster. Her previous books Helen Of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore and The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life were published to great critical acclaim and worldwide success. Hughes has made a number of factual films and documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4, PBS, National Geographic, Discovery, The History Channel and ABC. She is a Research Fellow of King’s College London and has been honoured with numerous awards including the Norton Medlicott Medal for History.

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