Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/91

 RELIGION. 7 1 completed by the birth of a son, who is often made the lover of his mother. Like Egypt and Chaldaea, Phoenicia had its triads, but they appear to have been less clearly fixed and defined than in the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates. It would seem that at Sidon there was a bond of this nature between Baal-Sidon, Astarte, and Esmoun, 1 a god whom the Greeks in later days assimilated to their own ^Esculapius. The female element in these triads was nearly always embodied in Astarte, at least, among the oriental Phoenicians. As a rule her name was preceded by the honorific title Rabbat, " the Great Lady," which was, moreover, applied sometimes to other goddesses.' 2 Anat, or Anahit, the Anaitis of the Greeks, was another name for the same deity ; under this title also she was worshipped in Syria, whence her cult passed into Egypt. We know from a Phoenician inscrip- tion that she was domiciled in Cyprus. 3 The name changed with the place, but the conception remained. Beside these great gods Phoenicia had several minor divinities, with whom we are as yet very imperfectly acquainted. Reshep, Resef, or Resef-Mikal, was the Phoenician Apollo. At least a bi-lingual cypriot inscription identifies him, in its Greek part, with the Amy clean Apollo. 4 Resef penetrated into Egypt, and judging from the way he was figured there we should be tempted to see in him a god of war, an Ares or Mars (Fig. 24). Other deities, Semes, or "the sun," Sakon, and Powiiai. the pygmy god of the Greeks, have been revealed to us by the proper names of men. It is among such gods as these and others of the same class that we must, no doubt, look for the seven Cabeiri, or " powerful ones," whose worship was imported by the Sidonians into Thrace, there to endure until the very last clays of paganism. The Cabciri were planetary gods, as their number alone is enough to show. Esmoun " the eighth," if we may accept the Semitic origin of his name was their chief. He was the third person of the triad which we encounter, under different names, in every Phoenician city. Esmoun was, in fact, the supreme manifestation of the divinity, 1 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, vol. i. part i. No. 3. 2 BERGER, La Phenicie, p. 22. 3 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, part i. No. 95. It is in speaking of this inscription that M. DE VOGUE has presented us with those keen remarks on the Phoenician religion that we quote so often in these chapters. 4 Corpus Inscriptionum Scwiticarum, part i. No. 89.