Atargatis
Atargatis was the chief goddess of northern Syria in Classical antiquity. Primarily she was a fertility goddess, but, as the baalat of her city and people she was also responsible for their protection and well-being. Her chief sanctuary was at Hierapolis, modern Manbij, northeast of Aleppo, Syria.
Michael Rostovtzeff called her "the great mistress of the North Syrian lands". Her consort is usually Hadad. As Ataratheh, doves and fish were considered sacred to her: doves as an emblem of the love goddess, and fish as symbolic of the fertility and life of the waters.
According to a third-century Syriac source, "In Syria and in Edessa, Mesopotamia|Urhâi the men used to castrate themselves in honor of Taratha. But when King Abgar became a believer, he commanded that anyone who emasculated himself should have a hand cut off. And from that day to the present no one in Urhâi emasculates himself anymore".
She is sometimes described as a mermaid-goddess, due to her identification with a fish-bodied goddess at Ashkelon.
Origin and name
Atargatis is seen as a continuation of Bronze Age goddesses. At Ugarit, cuneiform tablets attest multiple Canaanite goddesses, among them three are considered as relevant to theories about the origin of Atargatis:- ʾAṯirat, described as "Lady of the Sea" and "mother of the gods"
- ʿAnat, a war goddess
- ʿAṯtart, a goddess of the hunt also sharing Anat's warlike role, regarded as analogous to Ishtar and Ishara in Ugaritic god lists and as such possibly connected to love
The original Aramaic name of the goddess was ??????, with its other forms including ??????, ??????, ??????, and the apocope form ????. The name was composed of:
- ???, which during the Iron Age had evolved from being the name of the goddess ʿAṯtart to become used to mean "goddess" in general, and was used in the name in the sense of "goddess";
- and ???, which is the Aramaic variant of the name of the Semitic goddess ʿAnat.
Classical period
Various Greek and Latin writers have written about the goddess Atargatis or Derketo.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, and the inventor of useful appliances.
File:Kircher oedipus aegyptiacus 28 derceto.png|thumb|Derceto, from Athanasius Kircher's Oedipus Aegyptiacus, 1652.
Derceto was venerated in mermaid form, i.e., with "a face of a woman, and otherwise the entire body of a fish" in a shrine by Ashkelon, Syria, according to Diodorus, drawing on Ctesias ; the attached myth explaining that Derceto transformed into a fish, after drowning herself in a nearby lake. The goddess was presumably revered in that fish-form at Ashkelon. It has been conjectured that the veneration of the goddess did indeed occur at Ashkelon and may have originated there.
The image of Derceto as half-woman half-fish was also witnessed by Lucian somewhere in Phoenicia, but at the Holy City of Phoenicia, she was depicted entirely as a woman. This temple was nominally dedicated to "Hera", but some thought it actually consecrated Derceto.
Lucian in a later passage gives a description at length of this "Hera" whom the locals "call by a different name", at Hierapolis. The goddess was posed seated with two lions on her sides, "In one hand she had a scepter, in the other a spindle, and on her head she wears rays, a tower ..", and she wore a girdle as well. The head was set with a gemstone called which glowed by night.
The worship of Atargatis going back to the Hellenistic Phoenicia is evidenced by inscriptions at Akko.
Iconography
The literary attestations as already given are that Derceto was depicted as fish-tailed goddess at Ashkelon, and later at Hieropolis.But all of the extant iconography of the Syriac goddess catalogued in the LIMC shows her as anthropomorphic. But the "fish-goddess form of Atargatis" were among the finds unearthed in the Transjordan, or so Glueck has insisted, though only her forms as goddess of "foliage and fruits" or cereal goddess were published in his paper.
Numismatics
The tetradrachm issued under Demetrius III Eucaerus shows a fish-bodied figure on the reverse side, which scholarship identifies as Stargateis. The cult statues of Stargateis and her consort Hadad were commonly employed on as the motif on the reverse of tetradrachm coinage by this monarch and by Antiochus XII Dionysus who succeeded him.Hieropolis Bambyce was one of the cities which minted its own coins. And some of the Hieropolitan coinage portray "Atargatis as indeed seated between lions and holds a scepter in her right hand and probably a spindle in her left", just as Lucian had described. Palmyra coinage also depicts a Tyche on the obverse and strolling lion on the reverse; one coin also depicts a goddess mounted on a lion, and the lion symbolism suggest that Atargatis is being represented.
Coinage of Palmyra, some of which were found in the Palmyrene colony at Dura-Europos, may depict the goddess. The coin with Tyche on the obverse and a strolling lion on the reverse, and one with a goddess riding a lion points to Atargatis, based on the lion motif. There has also been found one Palmyrene tessera inscribed with Atargatis's name.
Sculptures
A relief fragment found at Dura-Europos is thought to represent Atargatis/Tyche, as it shows a pair of doves that are sacred to Atargatis besides her head; the doves are assumed to be perched on the post of her throne, which is missing. The figure's mural crown is emblematic of a Tyche of a city, but this matches the historic account that the cult relief Atargatis Hierapolis was seen wearing a mural crown.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.
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.
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.Diodorus Siculus, quoting Ctesius of Cnidus, tells how Derceto fell in love with a beautiful youth named Simios and bore a daughter but becoming ashamed of the illicit love, Derceto flung herself into a lake near Ashkelon and her body was changed into the form of a fish though her head remained human. In Diodorus's version of the legend, Derceto also despised the child from this union and had exposed the daughter to the desert, where she was raised by doves. This child grew up to be Semiramis, the legendary Assyrian queen. Lucian also notes that the erection of the temple at Hieropolis was ascribed by some to Semiramis who dedicated it to her mother Derceto.
Analysis
Ctesias's account, according to one analysis, is composed of two myths, the Derceto transformation myth, and the Semiramis birth myth, and a telling of each myth are told by a number of classical writers.The first myth is told, e.g., by Ovid as a Dione-Cupid myth. The irony is that even though Ovid explicitly mentions Derceto of Babylonia transforming into a fish, Ovid's version of this first myth is recorded in Fasti, and fails to mention the goddess in Syria metamorphosing into fish-shape. The metamorphosis thereafter needs be reconstructed by consulting other sources which preserves that original ending.
The second myth is told by various writers as an alternate version of the birth of Venus, however, Ctesias felt compelled to "drop" the egg element according to the analysis. This seemed a gratuitous excision to the analyst, given that Venus's birth from an ocean-found egg was not a far cry from the familiar version of the Aphrodite/Venus's genesis out of water.
Syrian Venus
Ovid in Fasti recounts the legend that the goddess Dione accompanied by Cupid/Eros plunged into the river in Mesopotamia, whereby a pair of fish came to convey them through water to aid her escape from Typhon. The fish pair was commemorated as the constellation Pisces of the zodiac, and local Syrians abstain from eating fish on account of it. Menander and others also relate this legend, and some of the versions, say that the goddess and Cupid subsequently transformed into fish, possibly preserving the original telling.The name Dione could refer to Aphrodite's mother, but it was also an epithet of Aphrodite/Venus herself. So the legend has also been told as one of Venus with Cupid casting herself into the Euphrates, then transforming into fish.
The second myth describes the birth of Syrian Venus as originating in an egg that fell into the Euphrates, rolled onto land by fish, was hatched in the clutches of doves.
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.