Island
Insula Cytera
Kythira
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Kythira, off the south-eastern tip of the Peloponnese in Greece, is the island the Tabula calls Insula Cytera. The Greek geographer Strabo praised its good harbours, and its trade reached far into the eastern Mediterranean: an Egyptian list of places from the reign of Pharaoh Amenhotep the Third already names it Kutira. Purple-dye fishing mattered here, and the island's cult of Aphrodite Urania may go back to Phoenician traders. The poet Hesiod calls the goddess of love Kythereia. Argos and then Sparta held the island, and Athens seized it several times.