Atargatis (known as Derceto by the GreeksPliny the Elder. Natural History, 5.19.1.) was the chief goddess of northern Syria in classical antiquity. Primarily she was a fertility goddess, but, as the baalat ("mistress") 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".M. Rostovtseff, "Hadad and Atargatis at Palmyra", American Journal of Archaeology 37 (January 1933), pp 58-63, examining Palmyrene stamped tesserae. 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 Urhâi [Edessa] the men used to castrate themselves in honor of Taratha. But when King Abgar became a [Christian] 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" (rbt ảṯrt ym) and "mother of the gods" (qnyt ỉlm) 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
John Day asserts that all three shared many traits with each other and may have been worshipped in conjunction or separately during 1500 years of cultural history. While the worship of Ashtart and Anat as a pair is well attested,M. Smith, 'Athtart in Late Bronze Age Syrian Texts [in:] D. T. Sugimoto (ed), Transformation of a Goddess. Ishtar – Astarte – Aphrodite, 2014, p. 49-51G. Del Olmo Lete, KTU 1.107: A miscellany of incantations against snakebite [in] O. Loretz, S. Ribichini, W. G. E. Watson, J. Á. Zamora (eds), Ritual, Religion and Reason. Studies in the Ancient World in Honour of Paolo Xella, 2013, p. 198 Steve A. Wiggins found no evidence Ashtart was ever conflated with Athirat.S. A. Wiggins, A Reassessment of Asherah: With Further Considerations of the Goddess, 2007, p. 57, footnote 124; see also p. 169 He also pointed out that the concept of Athirat, Anat and Ashtart as a trinity of sorts (popularized by authors like Tikva Frymer-Kensky), is modern and ignores the role of other deities in Ugarit - for example Shapash; as well as the importance of the connection between Athirat and El.S. A. Wiggins, A Reassessment of Tikva Frymer-Kensky's Asherah [in:] R. H. Bael, S. Halloway, J. Scurlock, In the Wake of Tikva Frymer-Kensky, 2009, p. 174S. A. Wiggins, Shapsh, Lamp of the Gods [in:] N. Wyatt (ed.), Ugarit, religion and culture: proceedings of the International Colloquium on Ugarit, Religion and Culture, Edinburgh, July 1994; essays presented in honour of Professor John C. L. Gibson, 1999, p. 327
The original Aramaic name of the goddess was (), with its other forms including (), (), (), and the apocope form (). The name was composed of: (, from earlier ), 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.
The Greek name of the goddess, attested in the forms (), (), (), and (), was derived from the non-apocope forms of its original Aramaic name, while her Greek name () was derived from ().
Classical period
Various Greek and Latin writers have written about the goddess Atargatis or Derketo.The modern repertory of literary allusions to her is van Berg, Paul-Louis (1973) 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.
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.
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 (1st century BCE), drawing on Ctesias (5th century BCE); 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 (2nd century) somewhere in Phoenicia (i.e., Phoenice Syria), but at the Holy City of Phoenicia (Hierapolis Bambyce), she was depicted entirely as a woman. This temple was nominally dedicated to "Hera", but some thought it actually consecrated Derceto. De Dea Syra, 14 apud Lucian in a later passage gives a description at length of this "Hera" whom the locals "call by a different name" (Atargatis), 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 [mural crown]..", and she wore a girdle () as well. The head was set with a gemstone called which glowed by night.De Dea Syra, 32, quoted in English in: . A more extensive quote is given in
The worship of Atargatis going back to the Hellenistic Phoenicia (Seleucid Syria) is evidenced by inscriptions at Akko.
Iconography The literary attestations as already given are that Derceto was depicted as fish-tailed goddess at Ashkelon (by Ctesias after Diodorus), and later at Hieropolis (by Lucian).
But all of the extant iconography of the Syriac goddess catalogued in the LIMC shows her as anthropomorphic.Drijvers Dea Syria LIMC. But the "fish-goddess form of Atargatis" were among the finds unearthed in the Transjordan, or so Glueck (cf. infra) has insisted, though only her forms as goddess of "foliage and fruits" or cereal goddess were published in his paper., note 3: ".. Besides the fish-goddess form of Atargatis, sculptures of her were found depicting her as a grain goddess (fig. 13) and as a goddess of foliage and fruits (figs 14–15).
Numismatics
The tetradrachm issued under Demetrius III Eucaerus (96–87 BCE, coin image above) 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 (87– 84 BCE) 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. only writes that Hieropolitan coins typically depicted "Zeus", but the lion was also added as a sub-type, and "the lion was known as the companion and avatar of Atargatis". 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 (token) inscribed with Atargatis's name (Aramaic: ).
Sculptures
A relief fragment found at Dura-Europos is thought to represent Atargatis/Tyche (Yale-French excavations, 1935–46), 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 (protector-goddess) of a city,, pp. 47–48, 172–173 apud Matheson but this matches the historic account that the cult relief Atargatis Hierapolis was seen wearing a mural crown., n. 30
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.Rostovtseff 1933:58-63; Dura-Europos III.
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.Baur, Dura-Europos III, p. 115. For Pindar (Sixth Olympian Ode), the Greek sea-goddess Amphitrite is "goddess of the gold spindle".
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 (2.4.2), quoting Ctesius of Cnidus, tells how Derceto fell in love with a beautiful youth named Simios (also Ichthys, meaning 'fish') 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 (the Derceto metamorphosis into fish) 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. Metamorphoses IV: 44ff. Ovid's version of this first myth (detailed below) is recorded in Fasti, and fails to mention the goddess in Syria (Dione) metamorphosing into fish-shape. The metamorphosis thereafter needs be reconstructed by consulting other sources which preserves that original ending.Hyginus, De astronomia II: 30 and Manilius IV: 580 sqq. apud