SYRIA DEA (Συρία Θεά). — The quintessential Syrian goddess, popularly known as Diasura or Jasura, is Atargatis, whose name appears to derive from *‘Atar* (= Astarte) plus *‘Até* (= Attis), almost as if to identify the goddess more precisely as the spouse of Attis.
The name was shortened by the Syrians to *Tar‘ātā* and by the Greeks to *Δεφχτσύ*. She was the first to reach Rome with her itinerant entourage of Galli, who carried the little shrine of the goddess on the back of an ass and went about consoling their Syrian coreligionists working in the countryside (Phaedrus 4, 2, 4; Tertullian, *Apol.*, 13; Apuleius, *Met.*, VIII, 26). Famous sanctuaries of hers stood at Byblos on the Phoenician coast, at Ashkelon by the sea of the Palestinian region, and above all at Bambyce (Mabog) in Syria, hence called the “holy city” (Hieropolis), now reduced to a heap of ruins beside a great pool fed by living springs; Lucian in *De Syr. Dea* describes II. In the Latin interpretation the goddess was assimilated to Rhea or Juno and had as her paredros Hadad, the storm god, depicted with a horned tiara on his head, long beard, and a thunderbolt in hand, and equated with Jupiter. Especially sacred to the goddess were doves and fish, the latter kept in the pool attached to the sanctuary.
The Syrian goddess is in the end but the Syrian form of the great Semitic nature deity: Ištar in Babylonia with the paredros Tammuz; Astarte in Phoenicia with the paredros Adonis; in her honor the characteristic festival of the Gardens of Adonis (Ἀδώνιος χῆνοι) was celebrated, in which clay pots sown with quick-sprouting plants (wheat, fennel, lettuce) were arranged around the reclining couple under a canopy and then cast into the water of the nearest sea or river, doubtless a sacred rite aimed at promoting the growth of vegetation through the rain that waters the fields (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 Hieropolis, affirmed by Lucian and confirmed by Bardesanes, *Dialogue on the Laws of 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).
Evidence of the cult of Atargatis in Rome is provided by the sanctuary of the Syrian deities discovered on the north slope of the Janiculum, near the *Lucus Furniae*; it consists of three superimposed buildings with a pool for the sacred fish. The second building was erected under Commodus by a certain *Gaiónas*, a Hellenized Syrian, who in his epitaph boasts that after presiding as a judge over the sacred banquets (δειπνοκρίτης) he rests “owing nothing to death,” i.e., secure in blessed immortality, thanks to the meal of mystic communion doubtless provided by the sacred fish of the goddess. Among the finds from this sanctuary is a small bronze male statuette, perhaps of the deceased Adonis, wrapped in seven coils of a serpent—perhaps the seven zones of the planetary spheres—and between the seven coils seven hens’ eggs, symbols of rebirth, recalling the saying of Arnobius (I, 36): “ovorum progenies di Syri.”