The History of Antiquity (Vol. 1-6). Duncker Max

Phœnicia; and when the fierce heat came they stretched out their hands to the sky and the sun. As they regarded the sun as the only lord of the sky, they called him Belsamen, which among the Phenicians means lord of the sky, and among the Greeks Zeus." But Aeon and Protogonus had also begotten children, called by the names of Phos (light), Pyr (fire), and Phlox (flame). These discovered fire by rubbing two pieces of wood together, and taught the use of fire, and begot children who surpassed all others in size and stature. The names of these giants were given to the mountains of which they possessed themselves, to Casius, Libanus, Anti-libanus, and Brathy (Tabor?). The giants begot Samemrumus, who is also called Hypsuranius, and Usous. These made a traffic of their mothers, for it was the custom in those days for the women to associate with any one. Samemrumus lived at Tyre, and discovered the art of making huts out of reeds and sedge, while Usous invented clothing made of the skins of the beasts which he knew how to slay. Samemrumus rebelled against Usous, but the latter took a tree and divested it of the branches, and was the first who went on board a vessel. Then he dedicated two pillars to the fire and the wind, and offered to these the blood of the beasts which he had taken. When the brothers were dead, prayers were offered to the pillars, and each year a festival was celebrated in honour of them. And for a long time afterwards Agreus (the hunter) was among the descendants of Usous, and Halieus (the fisher) among those of Samemrumus. From these sprung two brothers, of whom the one was Chusor, i.e. Hephaestus, who discovered the working of iron, and the other, who invented the fish-hook and was the first navigator, was named Zeus Meilichius;[501] and the two together discovered the building of walls by bricks. From these came Agros (the field), and Agrotes (the husbandman), who was worshipped in Phœnicia as a god, and was called the greatest god in Byblus. From these sprung Misor and Sydyk; from Sydyk came the Cabiri, who invented the ship.

About this time Eljon, named "the Highest," was born, and a woman of the name of Beruth; and these two dwelt at Byblus. They begot Uranus and Ge, and when "the Highest" fell in conflict with wild beasts, he was worshipped by his children as a god with libation and sacrifices. But Uranus succeeded his father in the kingdom, and took his sister Ge to wife, and with her begot El, who is also called Cronus, Dagon, who, after discovering corn and the plough, was called Zeus Arotrius, and Atlas. But as Uranus begot children with other women, El, when he was grown up, determined to revenge the slight put upon his mother. He provided himself with a sickle and a lance of iron, attacked Uranus, drove him from his throne, expelled him from the land, and took the kingdom for himself. He surrounded his house with a wall, and built Byblus, the first city of the Phenicians. His brother Atlas, whom he suspected, he threw into the abyss, and covered him with earth; his son he slew with the sword, and cut off his daughter's head. When in the thirty-second year of his reign he had laid an ambush for his father Uranus in the interior of the land, and in this way had got him into his power, he cut off his genitals, close by some springs and rivers. The blood flowed into these springs and streams, and this place became sacred, and is shown even at the present day. At the wish of El, "Astarte the Great," the daughter of Uranus, and Zeus Demarus, the son of Uranus by a concubine, and Adodus "the king of the gods," ruled over the land. As a symbol of her supremacy, Astarte placed the head of an ox on her own head, and when she had wandered over the whole earth she found a star fallen from heaven, took it, and dedicated it at Tyre on the sacred island. But when a pestilence came, and a mortality, El burnt his only son in royal robes as a sacrifice to Uranus on the altar which he had erected, and circumcised himself and forced his comrades to do the same. The city of Byblus he handed over to the goddess Baaltis, Berytus to the sea-god, to the Cabiri, and to the descendants of Agrotes (the husbandman) and of Halieus (the fisher), and when El came into the land of the South, he gave all Egypt over to Taauthus to be a royal habitation for him. To El, after his death, was consecrated the star named after him.[502]

We should indeed be in an evil case if we were restricted for our knowledge of Canaanitish rites to these fragments, which carry so plainly on the front of them their late origin, their fictitious genealogical combinations, into which the gods are brought, their over-subtle Euhemerism, and their mixture with Greek and Egyptian ideas. That threads of various systems of cosmogony intertwine and cross each other in these fragments is proved by the derivation of the origin of the world, first from the wind, and next from chaos, and then from Kolpia and Baau, and by the repetition even to the third time of the discovery of hunting, agriculture, and navigation. Happily there are other sources of information which allow us to bring the statements of Philo into some sort of order, and to supplement them in very essential points. We saw that the highest god of the Babylonians was El. If Philo tells us that the star known by his name, i.e. the planet Saturn, was consecrated to king El after his death, and if this king allows Astarte, Demarus, and even Adodus, the king of the gods, to rule after his death—if he apportions cities and provinces to Baaltis and the Cabiri—it becomes clear enough that for the Canaanites also El was the ruling god, and that in Syria also the planet Saturn belonged to him. But from the contest of El with Uranus, i.e. with the sky-god, in Philo, we may also with certainty conclude, that among the Canaanites also the highest place was allotted to Baal-Samim, i.e. to the lord of the sky, as Philo rightly explains that name; Philo denotes him as the god worshipped by the earliest generations of mankind. Among the Greeks also there was a myth, borrowed no doubt from the East, that Zeus (Baal) had once striven with El-Cronus.[503] As the god of Saturn, the El of the Canaanites would have to be placed beside the Adar of the Eastern Semitic nations. The inscriptions of Ramses II. have already mentioned Baal as the god of the Cheta. We also saw that the nomads of the peninsula of Sinai consecrated their highest mountain summit to the god of this name. The Moabites invoked Baal on Mount Peor. In Canaan also the mountain summits were sacred to this deity; in the south of the land the lonely peak of Casius on the Serbonian lake, then Carmel, Tabor, and Hermon. The Philistines worshipped him at Ekron; the names of numerous places in Canaan—Baal Hamon, Baal Hazor, Baal Meon, Baal Gad, Baal Perazim, Baal Tamar, Baalath, Baalbec, &c.—give us sufficient proof of the widespread worship of Baal in Canaan. We shall not go wrong if we regard him as the deity of the beneficent operation of the sun. If El cuts off the genitals of Uranus, i.e. of Baal-Samim, and the blood flows into the springs and streams, the meaning of the myth is without doubt that the beneficent god has imparted his life-giving, creating power to the fertilising water. Among the Phenicians springs and streams were sacred. The Carthaginian Hannibal swore to his compact with Philip king of Macedonia before "the rivers, meadows, and waters," and the Zeus Demarus of Philo must be explained as Baal Tamar, i.e. Baal in the procreative power. Northward of Sidon there falls into the sea a river especially sacred to Baal Tamar, which the Greeks called Tamyras (now Nahr Damur). It marks, no doubt, the spot where the act in the myth was localised, which, as Philo observes, was still pointed out. Pliny tells us that with the Belus, i.e. Baal (Sihor Libnath of the Hebrews), a mountain stream falling into the sea southward of Sidon, after a brief, and in the plain, a sluggish course from the parent lake, customs of a very sacred nature were connected.[504]

The goddess whom the Syrians invoked, beside the sun-god, had various names. According to the fragments of Philo, El had handed over the government of the city of Byblus to Baaltis, i.e. to Bilit, the "mistress." At Ascalon she was known as Derceto, at Hierapolis (Bambyke, Membidsh) as Atargatis;[505] the Hebrews call her Ashera. Herodotus calls the goddess of Ascalon Aphrodite Urania; he also denotes her as the goddess of the sexual impulse and of procreation, and mentions the temple at Ascalon, as the oldest temple of this goddess which he knew; "from this comes the shrine of Urania in Cyprus, as the Cyprians themselves said; and the Phenicians, who also belonged to Syria, founded the temple of Urania on Cythera." Pausanias observes that the Assyrians had been the first among men to worship Urania, and after the Assyrians came the Paphians in Cyprus, and the Phenicians at Ascalon.[506] Hence we may conclude that Baaltis, in nature or in name, was not far removed from the Bilit or Mylitta of the Babylonians, and this conclusion is sufficiently confirmed by all that we know of the worship of Baaltis. Cinyras,