Sidon

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South of the modern town, where the citrus groves crowd a bend of the Awali river, a limestone platform rises out of the ground in courses of pale block, twenty-two meters high and seventy across the front. It carried a temple that is gone. What survives is the podium that held it up, the stone channels that fed its basins, and a marble seat with a sphinx at either arm that the excavators called the throne of Astarte. The people who built it came down from a city by the sea to bathe in a sacred spring and to ask a god named Eshmun for their health. The god the Greeks would later call Asclepius. The city, two kilometers off, was Sidon.

Sidon — Phoenician ṢDN, Arabic Saida — sits on the Lebanese coast roughly forty kilometers south of Beirut, on a low promontory with a sheltered northern harbor. The name is usually read as something like “the fishery” or “fishing-town,” a plain commercial word for a place that lived from the sea. It is one of the oldest and, in its prime, one of the richest of the Phoenician cities, the great rival and, by tradition, the mother-city of Tyre a little to the south. So thoroughly was its name bound up with the seafaring people of the coast that Homer rarely speaks of Phoenicians at all: he speaks of the Sidonians, and means the whole purple-trading, glass-blowing nation by the name of its leading port.

A harbor of glass and purple

The promontory has been occupied since the Stone Age — Acheulean tools from one mound, Neolithic material from another — and by the Middle Bronze Age, around the start of the second millennium BCE, the port was already trading with Egypt. In the diplomatic archive of fourteenth-century Amarna, a king of Sidon named Zimredda writes to the Egyptian court as a vassal among vassals on a contested coast. From the start the city’s wealth rested on two industries that the ancient world associated with it almost as a trademark. The first was glass: the Phoenicians of the Sidonian coast were among the earliest to work it on a large scale, and later tradition would credit the discovery of glassmaking to merchants of the region. The second was the dye. Off the southern harbor the ground is still heaped with the crushed shells of the murex sea-snail, from whose glands the craftsmen drew the costly red-purple that clothed kings and gave the Greeks their very word for the people — Phoinikes, the purple men. Homer, cataloging the prizes of Achilles’ funeral games, sets out a silver mixing-bowl that “the well-skilled Sidonians had wrought,” the finest thing of its kind in the world. The compliment is exact: in the heroic imagination Sidonian work was simply the best work that money could buy.

In the Hebrew scriptures the city stands at the head of its line. The Table of Nations in Genesis names Sidon as the firstborn of Canaan, son of Ham — the eldest of the Canaanite peoples, and so a kind of ancestor of the whole coast. Elsewhere the texts call it “Great Sidon,” Tsidon rabbah, and treat “Sidonians” as a general word for the northern coast-dwellers, much as Homer does. The marriage that the books of Kings most disapprove of runs through it: Jezebel, the foreign queen who brings the cult of Baal into the kingdom of Israel, is daughter of Ethbaal, a king of the Sidonians. And when the same narrative indicts Solomon for his foreign wives, it charges him with going “after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians” — Ashtoreth being the Astarte of the city, her name deliberately vowel-twisted in the Hebrew toward the word for shame. To the writers of Jerusalem, Sidon was the type of the rich, idolatrous, seductive coast; from inside the Sidonian frame, the great goddess was simply the lady of the city, and Eshmun her divine consort the lord of its healing.

The god above the stream

Ruins of the sanctuary of Eshmun at Bustan el-Sheikh, northeast of Sidon — the best-preserved Phoenician temple complex in Lebanon. Photograph by BlingBling10, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The sacred heart of Sidon lay outside the city, at the place the Arabic now calls Bustan el-Sheikh, the grove of the sheikh, where the ancient sacred wood once stood. Here, beside a stream the Greeks would rename the river of Asclepius, the Sidonians raised the great extramural sanctuary of Eshmun. Eshmun was their god of healing and of bodily wholeness — a young god, a god who could die and be restored, lord of a cult that drew the sick and the anxious to wash in his water and lay their petitions at his feet. When Greek religion settled over the coast, Eshmun was matched, as a matter of course, with Asclepius, the Greek physician- god whose own sanctuaries worked by sacred springs and incubation; coins of the city from the third century BCE carry the equation openly, and the very river took the Greek god’s name.

The monumental sanctuary was begun, by its own inscriptions, under the priest-king Eshmunazar II in the Persian period, around the start of the fifth century BCE, to mark the city’s recovered wealth — though the great podium itself was raised under his successor Bodashtart and extended by later kings. That podium, the platform on which the lost temple stood, is the largest Phoenician structure surviving anywhere, a stepped mass of limestone fed by an elaborate system of channels and ablution basins that carried the stream’s water through the precinct for the rites of purification on which a healing cult depended. Among the chapels and dedications the excavators recovered the so-called throne of Astarte — an empty seat of Egyptian-style stone, flanked by sphinxes, the kind of “empty throne” on which a Near Eastern deity was understood to rest unseen. The sanctuary stayed in use for fully fifteen centuries, from the seventh century BCE to the eighth century CE, gathering a Roman colonnade and a nymphaeum over its Phoenician core. It is, by common assessment, the fullest and best-preserved Phoenician temple complex left to us — a rare case in which a coast that wrote its sacred books on perishable papyrus left instead a sanctuary one can walk through.

The “throne of Astarte” from the sanctuary of Eshmun, an empty seat flanked by sphinxes in the Egyptianizing manner. Photograph CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The empty throne is worth pausing on, because it sets out a habit of the Phoenician religious mind. The goddess is not carved sitting in it; the seat is left vacant for her, the way the sanctuary’s water is left running for a god who is felt rather than seen. The same restraint runs through the inscriptions of the coast, which speak endlessly of vow and gift and almost never of doctrine. From inside the frame this is not absence but tact: the lord of Sidon and the lady of Sidon are present in their city, in its harbor and its healing spring, and need no portrait to be there.

The priest-kings and their curses

The dynasty that built the sanctuary buried its dead in a necropolis southeast of the town, and it is from their tombs that Sidon speaks most fully in its own voice. In January 1855 workmen clearing the rock-cut burials at Magharet Abloun broke into the grave of Eshmunazar II, a king who had reigned briefly in the sixth century BCE. His coffin was an anthropoid sarcophagus of hard bluish-black amphibolite, cut not in Phoenicia but in Egypt, in the Egyptian fashion, with a serene Egyptian face and braided beard carved on the lid — Egyptian work that the Sidonians seem to have carried home as plunder, very likely seized when their fleet rode with the Persian king Cambyses in his conquest of Egypt around 525 BCE. Across the breast and trough of the coffin runs a Phoenician inscription of twenty-two lines, one of the longest the language has left.

The sarcophagus of King Eshmunazar II of Sidon, sixth century BCE, reused Egyptian amphibolite carrying a long Phoenician inscription and curse. Photograph by Eric Chan, CC BY 2.0.

The text names the dead man — Eshmunazar, king of the Sidonians, son of King Tabnit and of his mother Amoashtart, priestess of Astarte — and records what the dynasty had done for its gods: the building of temples to Astarte and to Eshmun, and to the Baal of Sidon. It notes, in passing, that “the lord of kings,” the Persian Great King, had granted Sidon the rich coastal towns of Dor and Joppa down in the plain of Sharon, a glimpse of the city’s standing under the empire. And then, at length, it curses. The king who lies here asks that no one open his resting-place, move his coffin, or lay another body beside him; against any who do, the inscription invokes that they have no resting place among the shades of the dead, no burial, no son or seed to follow them. The curse is the genre of the coast at its most characteristic — a funerary text that argues not theology but property, defending the grave with the full weight of the gods.

Eshmunazar’s father Tabnit lay nearby in a coffin of the same kind, and his case is stranger still: his sarcophagus had been used once already in Egypt, and carries on its front a hieroglyphic epitaph for an Egyptian general, with the Sidonian king’s own Phoenician inscription cut beneath it — two dead men, two scripts, one stolen box. Tabnit’s coffin is now in Istanbul; Eshmunazar’s passed to a French nobleman and then to the Louvre, where it became the first long Phoenician text recovered from Phoenicia itself, and so consequential that it helped send Ernest Renan’s expedition to survey the whole coast.

The grandest tomb of the necropolis carried no inscription at all. In 1887 the Ottoman scholar Osman Hamdi Bey, excavating the royal burials, uncovered a chamber holding several great carved sarcophagi, and among them the one the world has since called the Alexander Sarcophagus. It is a coffin of Pentelic marble from the late fourth century BCE, sculpted in the finest Greek manner and still bearing traces of its original paint, its long sides crowded with high-relief scenes of battle and the hunt — on one flank Alexander the Great himself, riding down the Persians at Issus. It is named for those scenes, not for its tenant: Alexander was buried in Egypt, and the coffin most likely held Abdalonymus, the man whom Alexander set on the throne of Sidon after taking the coast in 333 BCE. It too is now in Istanbul, the masterpiece of its museum.

Detail of the Alexander Sarcophagus from the royal necropolis of Sidon, late fourth century BCE: Alexander charging the Persians. Photograph by Patrickneil, CC BY-SA 2.5.

The weight of empire

For all its wealth Sidon was a city on a road that armies took, and its history is in large part the history of who held the coast. The Assyrians came first and hardest. When Sidon rose against Assyria under its king Abdi-Milkutti, the emperor Esarhaddon answered in 677 BCE by storming the city, throwing down its walls, beheading the captured king, and deporting its people — a thoroughness the Assyrian annals record with satisfaction. Babylon followed Assyria, and Persia followed Babylon, and under the Persian kings Sidon recovered and rose to be the first city of Phoenicia and the leading naval power of the empire’s western fleet; Sidonian squadrons fought for the Great King at Salamis. That standing ended in fire. Around 351 BCE the city led a revolt of the Phoenician towns against Artaxerxes III, and when the Persian army came its own king, Tennes, betrayed it and fled. The accounts say the citizens burned their ships so that none could escape, shut themselves in their houses as the Persians fired the town, and died in their tens of thousands — a self-destruction that became one of the set pieces of ancient memory. The city was rebuilt, and it opened its gates without a fight to Alexander not long after, receiving from him the king Abdalonymus whose coffin may be its finest monument.

Rome held the coast for centuries after the Greeks, and the sanctuary of Eshmun took on its Roman colonnade while the harbor traded on. The cult slowly went quiet; the temple fell; the platform sank under its own grove. In the Middle Ages the coast changed hands again, and the Crusaders who took Sidon in 1110 raised, in the early thirteenth century, the squat sea-fortress that still stands on its islet in the northern harbor, joined to the shore by a stone causeway — the Sea Castle, the city’s most familiar silhouette, built in part from antique columns dragged from the ruins and laid as bonding-courses in its walls.

The Sea Castle in the harbor of Sidon, built by Crusaders in the thirteenth century on an islet linked to the shore by a causeway. Photograph by Ahmad Zaatari, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Return of the kings

The sanctuary of Eshmun lay buried until the turn of the twentieth century, when treasure-hunters and then archaeologists — Theodore Macridy early on, and above all Maurice Dunand across the long campaign of 1963 to 1975 — cleared the podium, the basins, and the throne, and gave back to the world the only Phoenician temple one can still climb. The royal necropolis had already given back its kings: Tabnit and the Alexander Sarcophagus to Istanbul, Eshmunazar to Paris, where the black coffin with its curse stands among the most studied objects of the ancient Levant. The curse failed in the narrow sense — the tombs were opened, the bones moved, the kings carried off to foreign museums — and succeeded in another, for it is by those very inscriptions that Eshmunazar and his mother the priestess of Astarte are known to us at all, named in their own language across the breast of a stolen Egyptian box.

Modern Saida is a working port and provincial capital of some scale, its old town a warren of vaulted souks below the castle, the murex-mounds and the Eshmun grove on its edges. Homer’s Sidonians have been gone for two and a half millennia. Their god of healing kept his spring longer than the city kept its freedom, and the platform that held his temple has outlasted the temple, the city’s empire, and the empires that took the city — a bare podium above a stream, where the sick once came to be made whole.

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