Ourea

In Greek mythology, the Ourea (Ancient Greek: Oὔρεα "mountains," plural of Oὖρος) were progeny of Gaia, members of the Greek primordial deities, who were the first-born elemental gods and goddesses, children of Gaia:

And she brought forth long hills, graceful haunts
of the goddess Nymphs who dwell amongst the glens of the hills.^[1]

The nine ourea, Aitna, Athos, Helikon, Kithairon, Nysos, Olympus, Oreios, Parnes, and Tmolus, like Uranus, and Pontus, were parthenogenetic offspring of Gaia alone. The Greeks rarely personified an individual mountain; an exception might be Tmolus, both a king and a mountain in Lydia. Each mountain was said to have its own local nymph, an oread.

Peak sanctuaries, a feature of Minoan civilization on Crete, are also identified in some archaic sites in mainland Greece.^[2] They are not thought to be dedicated to the mountain itself.

Notes

1. Hesiod, Theogony, 129–131; Argonautica, 1.498.
2. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, 1985:26–28.

References

• Littleton, Scott and the Marshall Cavendish Corporation Gods, Goddesses, and Mythology, Volume 1. Marshall Cavendish, 2005. ISBN 978-0-7614-7559-0. pp. 1020, 1134
• Fitz Simon, James A., Vincent Alphonso Fitz Simon, The Gods of Old: and The Story That They Tell, T. Fisher Unwin, 1899. p. 27
• Hard, Robin, Herbert Jennings Rose, The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology: Based on H.J. Rose's "Handbook of Greek mythology", Routledge, 2004. ISBN 978-0-415-18636-0. p. 24