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| Background | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Dea Syria, "Goddess of Syria", rendered in one word Deasura. She is often now popularly described in one of her instances as the mermaid-goddess, from her fish-bodied appearance. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| At Ugarit, cuneiform tablets attest a fecund "Lady Goddess of the Sea" (rabbatu at̪iratu yammi), as well as three Canaanite goddesses — Anat, Asherah and Ashtart — who shared many traits and might be worshipped in conjunction or separately. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
at Hierapolis Bambyce she had a great temple. At Palmyra she appears on the coinage with a lion, or her presence is sgnalled with a lion and the crescent moon: an inscription mentions her. In the temples of Atargatis at Palmyra and at Dura-Europos she appeared repeatedly with her consort, Hadad, and in the richly syncretic religious culture at Dura-Europos, was worshipped as Artemis Azzanathkona. |
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| In the 1930s numerous Nabatean bas-relief busts of Atargatis were identified by Nelson Glueck at Khirbet et-Tannûr, Jordan, in temple ruins of the early first century CE; there the lightly veiled goddess's lips and eyes had once been painted red, and a pair of fish confronted one another above her head. Her wavy hair, suggesting water to Glueck, was parted in the middle. At Petra the goddess from the north was syncretised with a North Arabian goddess from the south al-Uzzah, worshipped in the one temple. At Dura-Europus among the attributes of Atargatis are the spindle and the sceptre or fish-spear. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
At her temples at Ascalon, Hierapolis Bambyce, and Edessa, there were fish ponds, whose fish only her priests might touch. Glueck noted in 1936 that "to this day there is a sacred fish-pond swarming with untouchable fish at Qubbet el-Baeddwī, a dervish monastery three kilometres east of Tripolis, Lebanon." |
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