Temple of Eshmun

The Temple of Eshmun is an ancient place of worship dedicated to Eshmun, the Phoenician god of healing. It is located near the Awali river, northeast of Sidon in southwestern Lebanon. The site was occupied from the 7th century BC to the 8th century AD, suggesting an integrated relationship with the nearby city of Sidon. Although originally constructed by Sidonian king Eshmunazar II in the Achaemenid era to celebrate the city's recovered wealth and stature, the temple complex was greatly expanded by Bodashtart, Yatonmilk and later monarchs. Because the continued expansion spanned many centuries of alternating independence and foreign hegemony, the sanctuary features a wealth of different architectural and decorative styles and influences.
The sanctuary consists of an esplanade and a grand court limited by a huge limestone terrace wall that supports a monumental podium which was once topped by Eshmun's Greco-Persian style marble temple. The sanctuary features a series of ritual ablution basins fed by canals channeling water from the Asclepius river and from the sacred "YDLL" spring; these installations were used for therapeutic and purificatory purposes that characterize the cult of Eshmun. The sanctuary site has yielded many artifacts of value, especially those inscribed with Phoenician texts, such as the Bodashtart inscriptions and the Eshmun inscription, providing valuable insight into the site's history and that of ancient Sidon.
The Eshmun Temple was improved during the early Roman Empire with a colonnade street, but declined after earthquakes and fell into oblivion as Christianity replaced polytheism and its large limestone blocks were used to build later structures. The temple site was rediscovered in 1900 by local treasure hunters who stirred the curiosity of international scholars. Maurice Dunand, a French archaeologist, thoroughly excavated the site from 1963 until the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975. After the end of the hostilities and the retreat of Israel from Southern Lebanon, the site was rehabilitated and inscribed to the World Heritage Site tentative list.

Eshmun

Eshmun was the Phoenician god of healing and renewal of life; he was one of the most important divinities of the Phoenician pantheon and the main male divinity of Sidon. Originally a nature divinity, and a god of spring vegetation, Eshmun was equated to Babylonian deity Tammuz. His role later expanded within the Phoenician pantheon, and he gained celestial and cosmic attributes. The myth of Eshmun was related by the sixth century Syrian Neoplatonist philosopher Damascius and ninth century Patriarch of Constantinople, Photius. They recount that Eshmun, a young man from Beirut, was hunting in the woods when Astarte saw him and was stricken by his beauty. She harassed him with her amorous pursuit until he emasculated himself with an axe and died. The grieving goddess revived Eshmun and transported him to the heavens where she made him into a god of heaven.
From a historical perspective, the first written mention of Eshmun goes back to 754 BC, the date of the signing of the treaty between Assyrian king Ashur-nirari V and Mati'el, king of Arpad; Eshmun figures in the text as a patron of the treaty. Eshmun was identified with Asclepius as a result of the Hellenic influence over Phoenicia; the earliest evidence of this equation is given by coins from Amrit and Acre from the third century BC. This fact is exemplified by the Hellenized names of the Awali river which was dubbed, and the Eshmun Temple's surrounding groves, known as the groves of Asclepius.

History

Historical background

In the 9th century BC, the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II conquered the Lebanon mountain range and its coastal cities. The new sovereigns exacted tribute from Sidon, along with every other Phoenician city. These payments stimulated Sidon's search for new means of provisioning and furthered Phoenician emigration and expansion, which peaked in the 8th century BC. When Assyrian king Sargon II died in 705 BC, King Luli joined with the Egyptians and Judah in an unsuccessful rebellion against Assyrian rule, but was forced to flee to Kition with the arrival of the Assyrian army headed by Sennacherib, Sargon II's son and successor. Sennacherib instated Ittobaal on the throne of Sidon and reimposed the annual tribute. When Abdi-Milkutti ascended to Sidon's throne in 680 BC, he also rebelled against the Assyrians. In response, the Assyrian king Esarhaddon laid siege to the city. Abdi-Milkutti was captured and beheaded in 677 BC after a three-year siege, while his city was destroyed and renamed Kar-Ashur-aha-iddina. Sidon was stripped of its territory, which was awarded to Baal I, the king of rival Tyre, and loyal vassal to Esarhaddon. Baal I and Esarhaddon signed a treaty in 675 in which Eshmun's name features as one of the deities invoked as guarantors of the covenant.

Construction

Sidon returned to its former level of prosperity while Tyre was besieged for 13 years by Nebuchadnezzar II. Nevertheless, the Sidonian king was still held in exile at the court of Babylon. Sidon reclaimed its former standing as Phoenicia's chief city in the Achaemenid Empire. Eshmunazar I, a priest of Astarte, and the founder of his namesake dynasty, became king around the time of the Achaemenid conquest of the Levant. Archaeological evidence suggest that, at the time of the advent of the Eshmunazar dynasty, there already was a cultic space on the site of the temple, but there were no monumental constructions yet. Originally, the center of worship may have been a cave or a spring.
In the following years, Xerxes I awarded king Eshmunazar II with the Sharon plain for employing Sidon's fleet in his service during the Greco-Persian Wars. Eshmunazar II displayed his new-found wealth by constructing numerous temples to Sidonian divinities. Inscriptions found on the king's sarcophagus reveal that he and his mother, Amoashtart, built temples to the gods of Sidon, including the Temple of Eshmun by the "Ydll source near the cistern". As the Bodashtart inscriptions on the foundations of the monumental podium attest, construction of the sanctuary's podium did not begin until the reign of King Bodashtart. The first set of inscriptions bears the name of Bodashtart alone, while the second contains his name and that of the crown prince Yatonmilk. Thirty foundation inscriptions are known to date; they were found concealed in the interior of the podium. The practice of intentional inscription concealment can be traced back to Mesopotamian roots, and it has parallels in the royal buildings of the Achaemenids in Persia and Elam. A Phoenician inscription, located upstream from the temple, that dates to the 7th year of Bodashtart's reign, alludes to water adduction works from the Awali river to the "Ydll" source that was used for ritual purification at the temple.

Roman era and decline

The Eshmun sanctuary was damaged by an earthquake in the fourth century BC, which demolished the marble temple atop the podium; this structure was not rebuilt but many chapels and temples were later annexed at the base of the podium. The temple site remained a place of pilgrimage in the classical antiquity during the early Roman Empire and until the advent of Christianity, when the cult of Eshmun was banned during the Persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire and a Christian church was built at the temple site across the Roman street from the podium. A Roman colonnade was built in the third century, probably by emperor Septimius Severus, and a Roman Villa showed a period of renewed relative importance for the city during the late period of Phoenicia under Roman rule. Furthermore, within the original Phoenician temple site the Romans added the processional stairway, the basins for ablutions and a nymphaeum with pictorial mosaics, that are still largely intact. Worn statuettes of three nymphs stand in the niches of a Roman fountain. Another earthquake hit Sidon around 570 AD; Antoninus of Piacenza, an Italian Christian pilgrim, described the city as partly in ruins. For many years after the disappearance of the cult of Eshmun, the sanctuary site was used as a quarry: Emir Fakhr-al-Din II used its massive blocks to build a bridge over the Awali river in the 17th century. The site later fell into oblivion until the 19th century

Modern discovery

Between 1737 and 1742, Richard Pococke, an English anthropologist, toured the Middle East and wrote of what he thought were ruins of defensive walls built with stone blocks near the Awali river. When the French orientalist Ernest Renan visited the area in 1860, he noticed that the Awali bridge abutments were built of finely rusticated blocks that originated from an earlier structure. He also noted in his report, Mission de Phénicie, that a local treasure hunter told him of a large edifice near the Awali bridge. The discovery was made in 1900 by four workers who were extracting blocks from the temple on behalf of Druze notable Nassib Jumblatt. They noticed that certain blocks had inscriptions with the engravings painted in red. A local antiques dealer bought three of the stones, all with the same inscription. Due to the enormous size of the blocks, they were cut down to just 15 or 20 cm in thickness, and some stones were also cut into two or three pieces. The Ottoman authorities dispatched Theodore Makridi, curator of the Museum of Constantinople, who cleared the temple remains between 1901 and 1903. Wilhelm Von Landau also excavated the site between 1903 and 1904. In 1920, Gaston Contenau headed a team of archaeologists who again surveyed the temple complex. The first extensive archaeological excavation revealing the Eshmun Temple remains was undertaken by Maurice Dunand between 1963 and 1975. Archaeological evidence shows that the site was occupied from the seventh century BC to the eighth century AD.