SYRIA DEA (Syria Theos). - The Syrian goddess par excellence, popularly Diasura, Iasura, is Atargatis, whose name seems to derive from 'Atar (=Astarte) plus 'Atè (=Attis), as if to identify the goddess more precisely as the spouse of "Attis."
The name was abbreviated by the Syrians to Tar'did and reduced by the Greeks to Δερεστό. She was the first to reach Rome with her itinerant retinue of Galli, who, carrying the goddess's little shrine on a donkey's back, would go to console their Syrian coreligionists who worked in the countryside (Phaedrus 4, 2, 4; Tert., Apol., 13; Apul., Met., VIII, 26). Her famous sanctuaries stood at Byblos on the Phoenician coast, at Ascalon on the sea of the Palestinian region, and above all at Bambikè (Mambog) in Syria, called for that reason the "holy city" (Hierapolis), now reduced to a heap of ruins beside a great pool fed by living springs; Lucian describes it in the De S. D. In the Latin interpretation the goddess is assimilated to Rhea or Hera and has as her paredros Hadad, god of the storm, depicted with a horned tiara on his head, a long beard, and a thunderbolt in his hand, and assimilated to Iuppiter. Particularly sacred to the goddess were doves and fish, the latter kept in the pool adjoining the sanctuary.
The d. S. is fundamentally nothing but the Syrian form of the great Semitic deity of fertile nature: Ishtar in Babylon with the paredros Tammuz; Astarte in Phoenicia with the paredros Adonis; in honor of which pair the characteristic festival of the Gardens of Adonis (Ἀδώνιδος χῆσαι) was celebrated, in which little clay pots sown with quickly growing plants (wheat, fennel, lettuce) were arranged around the pair lying beneath a canopy and then thrown into the water of the sea or of the nearest river, certainly a direct sacro-magical rite intended to provoke the growth of vegetation through the irrigating rain of the countryside (Theocritus, Idyll., XV, 109-44). She reached Syria not from Babylonia but from Anatolia through the Hittites, and this explains the presence of the Galli in the temple of Hierapolis, asserted by Lucian and confirmed by Bardesanes, Dialogue of the Laws of the Countries (Patrologia Syriaca, II, 490-658, Paris 1907, translated into Italian by G. Levi Della Vida, in the series "Scrittori cristiani antichi," 3, Rome 1921, p. 49).
Of the cult of Atargatis in Rome, the document is the sanctuary of the Syrian deities, discovered on the northern slope of the Janiculum, near the "Lucus Furrinae"; it consists of three superimposed buildings with a pool for the sacred fish. The second building was constructed under Commodus by a certain "Gaionas," a Hellenized Syrian, who in his epitaph boasts that after presiding as judge over the sacred banquets (δειπνοκρίτης), he lies in "nothing owed to death," that is, assured of blessed immortality, thanks to the mystic communion meal certainly provided by the fish sacred to the goddess. Among the finds from this sanctuary, mention should be made of a small male bronze statuette, perhaps the deceased Adonis, wrapped in seven coils of a serpent, perhaps the seven zones of the planetary spheres; among the seven coils, seven hen's eggs, symbol of rebirth, which recall the pronouncement of Arnobius (I, 36) "ovorum progenies di Syri."