Phoenician religion

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In the late seventeenth century a pair of marble pillars turned up at a sanctuary near Marsaxlokk on Malta, each carrying a short dedication in two scripts: Greek above, and beneath it a row of letters no European could then read. The Greek named Herakles. The other text, deciphered by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy in 1758, named Melqart — and in being read at all became the first Phoenician writing recovered in modern times. Two brothers had vowed the pillars to their lord; the Greek translation simply gave that lord the nearest familiar name. The episode is the whole subject in miniature. Phoenician religion survives almost entirely in this register — a vow cut in stone, addressed to a city-god, legible to outsiders only once they had renamed him.

Phoenician religion is the body of cults practiced by the Canaanite-speaking peoples of the Iron Age Levantine coast — the inhabitants of Tyre, Sidon, Byblos and Arwad and of their western colonies, Carthage chief among them — from roughly the early first millennium BCE down to the Roman period. It is a continuation of the older Canaanite religious world, the same world set out at length in the Bronze-Age tablets of Ugarit; but where Ugarit left a literature — a six-tablet cycle of Baal’s combats with Sea and Death, epics, funerary liturgies — the Phoenician cities left almost none. This is the governing fact of the subject, and every reconstruction begins by conceding it.

A religion without a scripture

There is no Phoenician sacred book, no theology in the Phoenicians’ own hand, no narrative of the gods composed by those who served them. What was written on papyrus and skin in the cities of the coast perished where it lay. What remains is of four kinds, each partial and each angled away from doctrine. First, the inscriptions: thousands of dedications, building texts, and funerary curses, cut in the consonantal Phoenician alphabet, overwhelmingly the language of vow and gift — to my lord, to my lady, because he heard my voice, may he bless — and almost never the language of belief. Second, the archaeology: the plan and furnishing of temples, the shape of votive deposits, the iconography of stelae and seals, mute as to what was said over them. Third, the testimony of neighbors who worshipped alongside the Phoenicians or fought them — Greek, Roman, and Hebrew writers, the last two frequently hostile, and the lurid charges they level must be weighed against that hostility rather than taken at face. Fourth, and most seductive, a late and many-times-mediated Greek account: the Phoenician History attributed to Philo of Byblos, a grammarian of the late first and early second century CE, who claimed to translate the work of an immensely ancient priest named Sanchuniathon. Philo’s text survives only because the Christian apologist Eusebius of Caesarea quoted long stretches of it in his Praeparatio Evangelica to expose pagan religion as deified men and natural forces — a euhemerizing frame Philo had already imposed, so that the gods reach us twice rationalized. Whether Sanchuniathon was a real source, a literary fiction, or a thread of genuine tradition dressed in Hellenistic clothing is itself contested. The religion is read, in the end, the way Barthélemy read the Cippi: sideways, through other people’s scripts.

The city and its god

The cults were civic before they were anything else. The Phoenician world was never a nation but a string of independent harbor-states, and each great city held a patron deity who was, in effect, the city’s other self — its guarantor, its ancestor, the addressee of its public oaths. The deity’s temple stood at the civic center; the city’s treaties were sworn by him; its coins, when it struck them, bore his sign; its king served as the cult’s chief minister, the human hinge between the community and its god. Religion and citizenship were not separable layers but a single fabric. To belong to Tyre was to belong to Melqart.

Melqart at Tyre is the clearest case, and his name says it: milk-qart, “king of the city.” He was a god of the sea and of seafaring, of kingship, and of a yearly cycle of death and waking. A Tyrian festival called in Greek the egersis, the “awakening,” marked his revival; Josephus, drawing on the Tyrian historian Menander of Ephesus, traces its institution to the tenth-century king Hiram, and a priestly office attested across the Phoenician diaspora — mqm ʾlm, “raiser of the god,” rendered into Greek as egerseites — kept the awakening alive wherever Tyrians settled. To Greeks Melqart was simply Herakles, and the equation was so complete that the Hercules of the far western Mediterranean was, at root, the Tyrian god carried west by colonists. Tyre’s chief goddess beside him was Astarte.

Eshmun at Sidon was a god of healing, his great sanctuary at Bostan esh-Sheikh outside the city furnished with springs and basins; the Greeks read him as Asclepius. His name attaches to Sidonian kings — Eshmunazar, “Eshmun has helped” — and the royal sarcophagus of Eshmunazar II, now in the Louvre, records in Phoenician how the king and his mother, a priestess of Astarte, built temples to Eshmun and to Astarte by the sea. Healing and kingship sit side by side in the one inscription.

The Lady of Byblos — Baalat Gubal, “the mistress of Byblos” — was the city’s patroness, a form of the great goddess later called Astarte and, in the wider Greek world, Aphrodite. Byblos, the oldest of the cities and the one with the deepest links to Egypt, set her in a sanctuary above the harbor that had stood, in one form or another, for two thousand years.

Behind these patrons stood the older Canaanite figures the Phoenicians had inherited and never discarded. El, the grey-bearded father of the gods, the creator, remote and presiding; and Baal, “lord,” the storm-god whose title — less a name than an honorific — attached itself to a crowd of local divinities, so that one city’s Baal was not necessarily another’s. Tyre’s Melqart, Carthage’s Baal Hammon, the Baal of the heavens invoked in treaties: each is a “lord” specified by place or function. The older grain-and-fish god Dagon, prominent on the coast in earlier ages, recedes in the first millennium but does not vanish. The system is less a fixed roster than a grammar — El above, a “lord” and a “lady” for each city, healers and craft-gods and underworld figures filling out the rest — into which any community could conjugate its own gods.

Worship: temple, vow, and the king who serves

What the cult actually consisted of is read off architecture and dedications rather than any rule-book. The temple was a god’s house in the literal sense: a walled precinct, often with an open forecourt and standing stones, enclosing an inner room that held the deity’s image or symbol and was entered by the priesthood alone. Sacred pillars — the betyls and twin columns that Herodotus describes seeing at Tyre, one of gold and one of emerald-green glass aglow at night — marked the presence without depicting it. Service ran on offering and festival: animal sacrifice, the burning of incense and the pouring of libations, the laying-up of votive objects, and the great calendar feasts such as Melqart’s awakening. A class of priests, sometimes headed by the king or queen, tended the image and the sacrifices; the sacrificial tariffs from Marseilles and Carthage, which list animals and the priests’ and donors’ portions like a fee schedule, are the nearest thing we have to a written liturgy, and they are accountancy, not prayer.

Above the priests stood the king, and the relation between throne and altar was the load-bearing wall of the whole structure. The Phoenician king was the city-god’s foremost servant and, in death, joined the honored dead under that god’s protection. The royal sarcophagi of Byblos and Sidon — Ahiram, Tabnit, Eshmunazar — speak in the first person across the centuries, identifying the king, recording his temple-building, and above all cursing whoever would open the resting-place: let him have no seed among the living and no couch among the shades. The curse is the most theological utterance the corpus offers, and it is a property-defense. The believer’s normal posture toward the gods was the vow — I made my offering, you heard my voice, bless me — and the overwhelming bulk of surviving Phoenician religious text is exactly this: a contract honored, carved to last.

The tophet

The most contested feature of the tradition is the tophet — a name borrowed from the Hebrew Bible’s account of a burning-ground in the valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, and applied by modern scholars to a distinct kind of Phoenician precinct found above all in the west. At Carthage, and at Punic sites in Sicily, Sardinia, and North Africa, open-air sanctuaries held thousands of urns, layered over centuries, each containing the cremated remains of an infant or a young animal — a lamb or a kid — or sometimes both together. Many were marked with stone stelae bearing dedications to the goddess Tanit, “face of Baal,” and to Baal Hammon, the chief god of Carthage; the formulae record a vow paid. The deposits are unmistakably religious and unmistakably tied to the very young. What they mean is the long quarrel of the field.

Greek and Roman writers — Kleitarchos, Diodorus, Plutarch — and the Hebrew prophets charge the Phoenicians and especially the Carthaginians with burning their own children alive to their gods, sometimes giving vivid detail of a bronze image into whose arms the child was placed. For a long time the tophet was read as the archaeological confirmation of those charges. One body of scholarship holds to that reading: the urns are the residue of ritual infant sacrifice, the molk offering, by which a family rendered to the god its most precious thing in fulfillment of a vow, the animal sometimes substituted for the child. The epigraphy, the demography of the remains, and the consistency of the formula are read as confirmation — the position argued, among others, by Paolo Xella and colleagues in the Antiquity exchange of 2013. Against this, another body of scholarship reads the tophet as a cemetery reserved for children who died at or near birth — stillbirths and neonates whose high natural mortality would more than fill the urns — with the dedications a rite of consecration committing the dead child to the god’s keeping rather than a record of killing. On this view the classical accounts are wartime propaganda and the biblical ones the rhetoric of reformers, both hostile, both projecting onto an enemy a horror the enemy did not commit. The osteological evidence — the age at death of cremated infant bone, with all the distortion that burning introduces — has been marshaled by both sides and settles neither. The two readings rest on the same urns and arrive at opposite worlds, and the hostility of the loudest ancient sources is a fact that constrains either conclusion. What is not in doubt is that the tophet was a place where the youngest of the city were given over to its gods, by fire, under a vow — and that the giving was felt to be owed.

Research and sources

The Phoenicians’ silence about themselves has made the modern study of their religion an exercise in assembling fragments. The standard general account in English is Glenn Markoe’s Phoenicians (University of California Press, Peoples of the Past, 2000; ISBN 978-0-520-22614-2), which treats the religion as one chapter of a continuous civilization spanning twelve centuries rather than a static Iron Age snapshot. For the central god of Tyre, Corinne Bonnet’s Melqart: Cultes et mythes de l’Héraclès tyrien en Méditerranée (Studia Phoenicia VIII, Leuven: Peeters, 1988) remains the definitive monograph, tracing the egersis and the spread of the cult through every western colony; its argument is summarized in the contemporary review in the Revue des études anciennes. The Greek window onto Phoenician myth is edited and translated in Harold W. Attridge and Robert A. Oden, Jr., Philo of Byblos: The Phoenician History (Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series 9, 1981; ISBN 978-0-915170-08-1), the working critical text of Sanchuniathon’s reported cosmogony and theogony. The euhemerizing original frame can be read in Eusebius’s Praeparatio Evangelica, Book 1, where Philo’s account is preserved among the church father’s quotations of otherwise lost authors; the older anthology of these and related fragments, I. P. Cory’s Ancient Fragments (1832, public domain), is hosted in full at the Internet Sacred Text Archive. The tophet debate turns on the dossier assembled in Paolo Xella, ed., The Tophet in the Phoenician Mediterranean (Studi Epigrafici e Linguistici 29–30, 2012–13) and the sharp exchange between the sacrifice and cemetery camps published in Antiquity 87 (2013). The Phoenician dimension of the older Canaanite material — El and Baal, the royal funerary curses invoking the shades — belongs with the Bronze-Age corpus treated under Ugaritic / West Semitic religion.

The renamings

Because the Phoenicians were the great seaborne traders and colonists of the early Mediterranean, their gods went where the ships went, and arrived under new names. Melqart sailed west with the Tyrian foundation of Gades, beyond the strait that the Greeks would call the Pillars of Herakles, and there became the Hercules of the far ocean, his sanctuary at Gades among the most venerated in the western world. Astarte met the Greek Aphrodite — herself plausibly shaped by Near Eastern contact, kin in turn to the Mesopotamian Ishtar — and passed through her into the Roman Venus; the planet that bears Venus’s name carries, at three removes, the morning-and-evening star of the Levantine goddess. And from the ordinary Phoenician word adon, “lord” — the same root that filled out the crowd of Baals — Greek made a proper name: the dying and returning youth Adonis, mourned by women in the gardens of high summer, beloved of Aphrodite, a Levantine god received into Greek ritual under what had been merely his title.

This is how Phoenician religion is known: not as a system handed down intact, but as the substance behind other people’s names — a god read off the Greek line written above his own, a goddess renamed for a planet, a title taken for a hero. The cities themselves left the vow, the curse, the urn, and the stone, and asked of their gods only that they answer when their names were called, in whatever tongue.

→ Related: Canaan · Baal · Astarte · Adonis · Dagon · Ugaritic West Semitic Religion · Iron Age · Hercules · Venus · Ishtar