SYRIA DEA (Συρία θεός). — The pre-eminent Syrian goddess, popularly Diasura, Iasura, is Atargatia, 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 shortened by the Syrians to Tar'did and reduced by the Greeks to Δερεστό. She was the first to arrive in Rome with her itinerant retinue of Galli who, carrying the goddess’s little shrine on the back of a donkey, went to console their Syrian coreligionists who worked in the countryside (Phaedrus 4, 2, 4; Tert., Apol., 13; Apul., Met., VIII, 26). Her celebrated sanctuaries stood at Byblos on the Phoenician coast, at Ashkelon on the sea of the Palestinian region, and above all at Bambikè (Mambog) in Syria, hence called the «holy city» (Hierapolis), now reduced to a heap of ruins beside a large pond fed by living springs; Lucian describes it in 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, represented with a horned tiara on his head, a long beard, and a thunderbolt in his hand, and assimilated to Iuppiter. The dove and the fish were particularly sacred to the goddess, the latter being fed in the pool adjoining the sanctuary.
The S. d. is ultimately nothing other than the Syrian form of the great Semitic divinity of fertile nature: Istar in
Babylonia with her paredros Tammóz; Astarte in Phoenicia with her paredros Adonis. In honor of this couple, the characteristic festival of the Gardens of Adonis (Ἀδώνιδος χῆσαι) was celebrated, during which clay pots sown with rapidly growing plants (wheat, fennel, lettuce) were arranged around the reclining couple beneath a pavilion and then thrown into the water of the sea or of the nearest river, certainly as a sacred-magical act intended to bring about the growth of vegetation through the rain that irrigated 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, affirmed by Lucian and confirmed by Bardesanes, Dialogue on the Laws of the Countries (Patrologia Siriaca, II, 490-658, Paris 1907, translated into Italian by G. Levi Della Vida, in the series « Scrittori cristiani antichi », 3, Rome 1921, p. 49).
The sanctuary of the Syrian divinities discovered on the northern slope of the Janiculum, near the « Lucus Furrinae », provides evidence of the cult of Atargatia in Rome; 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 boasts in his epitaph that, after having presided as judge over the sacred banquets (δειπνοκρίτης), he lies in « nothing owed to death », that is, secure in blessed immortality, thanks to the mystery 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 statue, perhaps the deceased Adonis, wrapped within seven coils of a serpent, perhaps the seven zones of the planetary spheres; among the seven coils are seven hen’s eggs, a symbol of rebirth, recalling the statement of Arnobius (I, 36): « ovorum progenies di Syri ».