Atargatis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 1 of 4

Atargatis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fertile Crescent
For the metal band, see Atargatis (band). For the god in Robert E. myth series
Howard's Conan series, see Derketo (Conan)
"Atergatis" redirects here. For the crab genus, see Atergatis (crab). Mesopotamian
Levantine
Arabian
Atargatis, in Aramaic ‘Atar‘atah, was a Syrian deity, "the great mistress Mesopotamian religion
of the North Syrian lands" Rostovtseff called her,[1] commonly known to Yezidism
the ancient Greeks by a shortened form of the name, Derceto or Derketo The Levant
[2] and as Dea Syria, "Goddess of Syria", occasionally rendered in one  El  Berith
word Deasura. She is often now popularly described as the mermaid-  Elyon  Dagon
 Hadad  Elohim
goddess, from her fish-bodied appearance at Ascalon and in Diodorus  Adon  Eshmun
Siculus — a widely accessible source — but which is by no means her  Anat  Kubaba
universal appearance.[3]  Arsu 

Liluri
Manuzi
 Asherah
 Astarte  Mot
Her consort is usually Hadad. As Ataratha she may be recognized by the  Atargatis  Shaddai
self-mutilation of her votaries, recorded in a perhaps sensationalist  Azizos  Salem
Christian passage from the Book of the Laws of the Countries, one of the  The Ba'als  Yam
 Ba`alat Gebal  Yarikh
oldest works of Syriac prose, an early-third-century product of the school
of Bar Daisan (Bardesanes):
Religions of the Ancient Near
"In Syria and in Urhâi [Edessa] the men used to castrate East
themselves in honor of Ataratha. But when King Abgar
became a believer, he commanded that anyone who Levantine deities
emasculated himself should have a hand cut off. And
from that day to the present no one in Urhâi emasculates Adonis/Gauas ·Anat ·Asherah ·Ashima ·
himself anymore." —Chapter 45. Athtart/Astarte ·Atargatis ·Ba'al ·Berith ·
Chemosh ·Dagon ·Derceto ·El ·Elyon ·
Contents Eshmun ·Hadad ·Kothar-wa-Khasis ·
Melqart ·Moloch ·Mot ·Qetesh ·Resheph ·
 1 Her name Shahar ·Shalim ·Shapash ·Yahweh ·Yam ·
 2 Cult centers and images Yarikh
 3 Syncretism
 4 Atargatis mythology Mesopotamian deities
 5 Notes
 6 References Abzu/Apsu ·Adad ·Amurru ·An/Anu ·
 7 External links Anshar ·Ashur ·Enki/Ea ·Enlil ·Ereshkigal ·
Inanna/Ishtar ·Kingu ·Kishar ·Lahmu &
Lahamu ·Marduk ·Mummu ·Nabu ·Nammu ·
Her name Nanna/Sin ·Nergal ·Ningizzida ·Ninhursag ·
Ninlil ·Tiamat ·Utu/Shamash
At Ugarit, cuneiform tablets attest a fecund "Lady Goddess of
the Sea" (rabbatu at iratu yammi), as well as three Canaanite
goddesses — Anat, Asherah and Ashtart — who shared many Egyptian deities
traits and might be worshipped in conjunction or separately
Amun ·Ra ·Apis ·Bakha ·Isis ·Horus ·
during 1500 years of cultural history.[4] Osiris ·Ptah
At Hierapolis Bambyce, on coins of about the fourth century
BCE, the legend tr‘th appears, for 'Atar'ate, and tr‘th mnbgyb Greek deities
Atargatis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 2 of 4

in a Nabataean inscription; at Kafr Yassif near Akko an altar is

inscribed "to Adado and Atargatis, the gods who listen to Ares ·Aphrodite ·Apollo ·Athena ·Artemis ·
prayer",[5] The full name ‘tr‘th appears on a bilingual Hades ·Hera ·Hermes ·Hephaestus ·
inscription found in Palmyra. Demeter ·Poseidon ·Zeus

This name ‘Atar‘atah is a compound of two divine names: the

first part (Atar) is a form of the Ugaritic ‘Athtart, Himyaritic
‘Athtar, the equivalent of the Old Testament ‘Ashtoreth, the Phoenician <A class=mw-redirect title=`Ashtart
href="/wiki/%60Ashtart">‘Ashtart rendered in Greek as Astarte. The feminine ending -t has been omitted.
Compare the cognate Akkadian form Ishtar. The second half (atis) may be a Palmyrene divine name Athe (i.e.
tempus opportunum), which occurs as part of many compounds.[citation needed]

Alternatively, the second half (gatis) may relate to the Greek gados "fish".[6] (For example, the Greek name
for "sea monster" or "whale" is the cognate term ketos). So Atar-Gatis may simply mean "the fish-goddess
Atar".

Cult centers and images

As a consequence of the first half of the name, Atargatis has frequently, though wrongly, been identified as
‘Ashtart.[7] The two deities were probably of common origin and have many features in common, but their
cults are historically distinct. There is reference in 2 Maccabees 12.26[8] and 1 Maccabees 5:43[9] to an
Atargateion or Atergateion, a temple of Atargatis, at Carnion in Gilead, but the home of the goddess was
unquestionably not Israel or Canaan, but Syria itself; at Hierapolis Bambyce she had a temple in her name. At
Palmyra she appears on the coinage with a lion, or her presence is signalled with a lion and the crescent moon;
an inscription mentions her. In the temples of Atargatis at Palmyra and at Dura-Europos[10] she appeared
repeatedly with her consort, Hadad, and in the richly syncretic religious culture at Dura-Europos, was
worshipped as Artemis Azzanathkona.[11] Two well preserved temples in Niha, Lebanon are dedicated to her
and to Hadad. 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;[12] 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.[13]

At her temples at Ascalon, Hierapolis Bambyce, and Edessa, there were fish ponds containing fish only her
priests might touch.[14] 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."[15]

From Syria her worship extended to Greece and to

the furthest West. Lucian[16] 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. 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 her importance.
Again we find the cult in Sicily, introduced, no
On the reverse of a coin of Demetrius III Eucaerus, a fish-
doubt, by slaves and mercenary troops, who
bodied veiled Atargatis, flanked by barley stalks, holds a
carried it even to the farthest northern limits of the
flower.
Roman Empire. The leader of the rebel slaves in
Atargatis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 3 of 4

the First Servile War, a Syrian named Eunus,

claimed to receive visions of Atargatis, whom he identified with the Demeter of Enna.

Syncretism
In many cases Atargatis, ‘Ashtart, and other goddesses who once had independent cults and mythologies
became fused to such an extent as to be indistinguishable. This fusion is exemplified by the Carnion temple,
which is probably identical with the famous temple of ‘Ashtart at Ashtaroth-Karnaim. Atargatis generally
appears as the wife of Hadad. They are the protecting deities of the community. Atargatis, wearing a mural
crown, is the ancestor the royal house, the founder of social and religious life, the goddess of generation and
fertility (hence the prevalence of phallic emblems), and the inventor of useful appliances. Not unnaturally she
is identified with the Greek Aphrodite. By the conjunction of these many functions, despite originating as a
sea deity analogous to Amphitrite, she becomes ultimately a great nature-goddess, analogous to Cybele and
Rhea: In one aspect she typifies the protection of water in producing life; in another, the universal of other-
earth;[17] in a third (influenced, no doubt, by Chaldean astrology), the power of Destiny.

Atargatis mythology
The legends are numerous and of an astrological character. A rationale for the Syrian dove-worship and
abstinence from fish is seen in the story in Athenaeus 8.37, where Atargatis is naively explained to mean
"without Gatis", the name of a queen who is said to have forbidden the eating of fish. Thus Diodorus Siculus
(2.4.2), quoting Ctesias, tells how Derceto fell in love with a youth and became by him the mother of a child
and how in shame Derceto flung herself into a lake near Ascalon and her body was changed into the form of a
fish though her head remained human. Derceto's child grew up to become Semiramis, the Assyrian queen. In
another story, told by Hyginus, an egg fell from the sky into the Euphrates, was rolled onto land by fish, doves
settled on it and hatched it, and Venus, known as the Syrian goddess, came forth.

The author of Catasterismi explained the constellation of Piscis Austrinus as the parent of the two fish making
up the constellation of Pisces; according to that account, it was placed in the heavens in memory of Derceto's
fall into the lake at Hierapolis Bambyce near the Euphrates in Syria, from which she was saved by a large fish
— which again is intended to explain the Syrian abstinence from fish.

Ovid in his Metamorphoses (5.331) relates that Venus took the form of a fish to hide from Typhon. In his
Fasti (2.459-.474) Ovid instead relates how Dione, by whom Ovid intends Venus/Aphrodite, fleeing from
Typhon with her child Cupid/Eros came to the river Euphrates in Syria. Hearing the wind suddenly rise and
fearing that it was Typhon, the goddess begged aid from the river nymphs and leapt into the river with her
son. Two fish bore them up and were rewarded by being transformed into the constellation Pisces — and for
that reason the Syrians will eat no fish.

A recent analysis of the cult of Atargatis is the essay by Per Bilde, in Religion and Religious Practice in the
Seleucid Kingdom (in series "Studies in Hellenistic Civilization") Aarhus University Press (1990), in which
Atargatis appears in the context of other Hellenized Great Goddesses of the East.

Notes
1. ^ M. Rostovtseff, "Hadad and Atargatis at Palmyra", American Journal of Archeology 37 (January 1933) , pp 58-
63, examining Palmyrene stamped tesserae.
2. ^ Strabo 16.785; Pliny, Natural History 5.81.
3. ^ The modern repertory of literary allusions to her is Paul Louis van Berg, Corpus Cultus Deae Syriae (C.C.D.S.):
les sources littéraires, Part I: Répertoire des sources grecques et latines; Part II: Études critiques des sources
mythologiques grecques et latines (Leiden:Brill) 1973.
4. ^ Robert A. Oden, Jr, "The Persistence of Canaanite Religion" The Biblical Archaeologist 39.1 (March 1976, pp.
31-36) p. 34; "the name of the Hellenistic and Roman goddess Atargatis was a compound of Astarte and Anat",
Atargatis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 4 of 4

JAB simply states in Piotr Bienkowski, Alan Ralph Millard , eds. Dictionary of the Ancient Near East, (2000:s.v.
"Anat").
5. ^ These instances are noted in Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, Pieter Willem van der Horst, Dictionary of
Deities and Demons in the Bible, (1995:s.v. "Hadad"); the name also appears in the Talmud ("Ab. Zarah" 11b, line
28) as tr‘th.
6. ^ Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. Atargatis" (Perseus.org on-line text)
7. ^ Dirven's hypothesis that at Palmyra Atargatis was identical to Astarte, who functioned as the Gad of Palmyra, has
been criticised by Ted Kaizer (The Religious Life of Palmyra 2002 :153f), who suggests that we "stick to the divine
names actually given by the worshippers" and follow the Palmyrene inscriptions, which distinguish between them.
8. ^ on-line text
9. ^ Simply referinng to "the temple that was in Carnaim" (on-line text).
10. ^ She is intended at Dura-Europos in the guise of the Tyche of Palmyra, accompanied by the lion, in a fresco from
the sanctuary of the Palmyrene gods, removed to the Yale Art Gallery.
11. ^ Rostovtseff 1933:58-63; Dura-Europos III.
12. ^ Nelson Glueck, "A Newly Discovered Nabataean Temple of Atargatis and Hadad at Khirbet Et-Tannur,
Transjordania" American Journal of Archaeology 41.3 (July 1937), pp. 361-376.
13. ^ Baur, Dura-Europos III, p. 115. For Pindar (Sixth Olympian Ode), the Greek sea-goddess Amphitrite is "goddess
of the gold spindle".
14. ^ Lucian, De Dea Syria; Diodorus Siculus II.4.2.
15. ^ Glueck 1936: p. 374, note 4
16. ^ Lucian, De Dea Syria.
17. ^ Macrobius. Saturn, 1.23.

References
 Moshe Weinfeld, "Semiramis: her name and her origin." In: Mordechai Cogan/Israel Eph’al (ed.), Ah,
Assyria...:Studies in Assyrian history and ancient Near Eastern historiography presented to Hayim
Tadmor (series Scripta Hierosolymitana 33), (Jerusalem 1991), 99-103.
 This article incorporates text from a publication nowin the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed
(1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (Eleventh ed.). Cambridge University Press.

External links
 Atargatis by Abufares
 Jewish Encyclopedia: Derceto
 Lucian of Samosata, Concerning the Syrian Goddess (English translation and commentary.)
 Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911: "Atargatis"
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atargatis"
Categories: West Semitic goddesses | Sea and river goddesses | Hellenistic Asian deities

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