rhyme cryme

I’m about to set off for the UK, and I shall be offline for a couple of days, so, in line with my usual practice, I’ve put together another of my convoluted connection puzzles in the hope that someone will have solved it before I can get back online. I think that someone should, because this may be the easiest puzzle I’ve ever devised.

What connects the following five ‘clues’?
• a twentieth-century artist;
• an African country;
• an island;
• a goddess; and
• an ancient language, now dead.

If you haven’t seen this kind of puzzle before, you will need to turn what are seemingly vague clues into specific answers. For example, is the artist Picasso? Matisse? Jackson Pollock? Or someone else? Is the country Egypt? Kenya? Angola? Or somewhere else? The overall answer to the puzzle can only be found by comparing lists of answers for the individual clues, but once you have a match between two clues, the rest should fall into place easily. You will have heard of all the individual answers, with the possible exception of the ancient language.

As usual, I will acknowledge all correct answers, but I won’t actually publish the answer for a few weeks, to give other readers a chance to work it out for themselves.

spoiler alert
The correct solution has been submitted below.

similar puzzles
A Hard Question
What’s the Connection?
Odd One Out
All Greek to Me
An English Question