11/27/2023 0 Comments QuotatargatisAgain we find the cult in Sicily, introduced, no doubt, by slaves and mercenary troops, who carried it even to the farthest northern limits of the Roman empire. The wide extension of the cult is attributable largely to Syrian merchants thus we find traces of it in the great seaport towns at Delos especially numerous inscriptions have been found bearing witness to its importance. Lucian and Apuleius give descriptions of the beggar-priests who went round the great cities with an image of the goddess on an ass and collected money. 1 Maccabees 5.43), but the home of the goddess was unquestionably not Israel or Canaan, but Syria proper, especially at Hierapolis, where she had a great temple.įrom Syria her worship extended to Greece and to the furthest west. We find reference to an Atargateion or Atergateion, a temple of Atargatis) at Carnion in Gilead (cf. The two deities were probably of common origin and have many features in common, but their cults are historically distinct. tempus opportunum), which occurs as part of many compounds.Īs a consequence of the first half of the name, Atargatis has frequently, though wrongly, been identified as ‘Ashtart. The second half is a Palmyrene divine name Athe (i.e. Compare the cognate Akkadian form Ishtar. This name ‘Atar‘atah is a compound of two divine names: the first part is a form of the Ugaritic ‘Athtart, Himyaritic ‘Athtar, the equivalent of the Old Testament ‘Ashtoreth, the Phoenician ‘Ashtart rendered in Greek as Astarte. And from that day to the present no one in Urhâi emasculates himself anymore." -Chapter 45. But when King Abgar became a believer, he commanded that anyone who emasculated himself should have a hand cut off. "In Syria and in Urhâi the men used to castrate themselves in honor of Taratha. The full name ‘tr‘th appears on a bilingual inscription found in Palmyra and on coins.Īs Ataratha she may be recognized by the characteristic self-mutilation of her votaries, recorded in a passage from the Book of the Laws of the Countries, one of the oldest works of Syriac prose, an early 3rd century product of the school of Bar Daisan (Bardesanes): She is often now popularly described as the mermaid-goddess. 5.81), and as Dea Syria (the "Goddess of Syria, rendered in one word Deasura). Atargatis, in Aramaic ‘Atar‘atah, was a Syrian deity, more commonly known to the Greeks by a shortened form of the name, Derceto or Derketo (Strabo 16.785 Pliny, Nat.
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