The Temple of Eshmun

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Northeast of the old city, where the coastal plain folds up into the first hills of the Lebanon and a river comes down cold out of the mountain, there is a grove of citrus the country people call Bustan el-Sheikh, the garden of the sheikh. Under the trees the ground is not level. It rises in a great built terrace of bossed limestone, block laid on block, a wall that runs back into the slope and lifts a platform high above the springs. The water is still there. It runs in cut channels and gathers in stone basins, the same water that ran when the kings of Sidon set their masons to the hill, for the god raised here was a god of health, and his cult was bound to the spring as a cure is bound to its source.

This is the house of Eshmun, the healing-god of Sidon, and it is the best-preserved Phoenician temple to come down to us. Most of what the Phoenician homeland built has been quarried away, buried under living towns, or thrown down by the long sequence of earthquakes that shook this coast. The sanctuary at Bustan el-Sheikh survived because its core was not a building but a mountain of masonry — a podium that no later age found worth the labor of removing. On it the architecture of an entire vanished cult is still legible: the terraces, the water, the thrones, and the small carved children laid before the god.

The valley, the kings, and the digging

The site sits about two kilometers northeast of Sidon, in the valley of the river the Greeks would later call the Asclepius — the modern Awali, the ancient Bostrenos — whose name itself records what the place became to the outside world. The first sanctuary here is old. The cult reaches back to about the seventh century before our era, and the precinct went on being used, rebuilt, and added to for more than a thousand years, down into Roman and Byzantine times; the latest occupation runs into the eighth century of the common era.

The Phoenician homeland is, by the standards of the ancient Near East, a place that left a thin written record of itself — the papyrus rotted in the damp coast, the great libraries are gone, and much of what we would call Phoenician literature survives only as quotation in Greek. But the kings of Sidon wrote in stone, and at Bustan el-Sheikh the building of the temple is documented in the worshipers’ own language by the men who paid for it. The decisive testimony is the podium itself. Concealed within the foundations of the monumental platform, the excavators recovered a series of inscriptions — some thirty foundation texts — bearing the name of King Bodashtart, who reigned at Sidon in the later sixth century BCE under the loose oversight of the Persian empire. One set of these foundation inscriptions carries Bodashtart’s name alone; a second set adds the name of the crown prince, Yatonmilk. The great podium, in other words, is dated and signed.

A second royal text frames the whole enterprise. The sarcophagus of Eshmunazar II — a black stone coffin of Egyptian make, found at Sidon and now famous as one of the longest Phoenician inscriptions known — records the temple-building of his dynasty in the first person. In its lines the king and his mother, the priestess Amoashtart, declare that they built houses for the gods of Sidon: a temple of Astarte by the sea, the temple of the Lord of Sidon, and a temple for Eshmun at the spring of Ydll on the mountain. That spring on the mountain is read by most scholars as Bustan el-Sheikh, which would set the temple of Eshmun squarely within the building program of the Sidonian kings of the late sixth and early fifth centuries — Eshmunazar, his mother, and Bodashtart, the line that gave the god his name to half its members. The marble shrine that once stood on the summit of the podium, in a Greco-Persian manner, belongs to about 500 BCE; an earthquake in the fourth century brought it down, and what remains today is overwhelmingly the platform that carried it.

The recovery of the site is itself a twentieth-century story. The first spades came early — Theodore Makridi worked here in 1901–1903 on behalf of the Ottoman museum, Wilhelm von Landau followed in 1903–1904, and Gaston Contenau dug in 1920 — but the sanctuary as it can now be read is the work of the French archaeologist Maurice Dunand, who excavated at Bustan el-Sheikh across the years 1963 to 1975. It was Dunand who cleared the terraces and the basins, who exposed the full elevation of the podium, and who lifted from the ground beside the water channel the votive children that are the most affecting thing the temple has to give. He recovered, too, examples of cursive Phoenician writing on potsherds — a rarity from the mainland — so that the sanctuary speaks not only in the formal lapidary script of kings but in the ordinary hand of the people who served it.

The bossed limestone terraces and podium of the sanctuary of Eshmun at Bustan el-Sheikh, northeast of Sidon. BlingBling10, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The podium, the water, and the offered children

What the precinct preserves, and what makes it a window onto the cult rather than a heap of stones, is the way the architecture is built around the god’s particular work. Eshmun heals, and the sanctuary is a machine for the management of water.

The podium is the first fact of the place. It is a built mountain: a façade some seventy meters wide, rising more than twenty meters above the court, and running back fifty meters into the hillside — a mass of heavily bossed limestone blocks, some over three meters across and a meter thick, laid up without the marble facing that would have dressed the temple proper. The visitor came to the god by climbing. The terraces step up the slope, and the eye is carried from the springs at the bottom to the shrine that once stood at the top, so that the act of approach was itself an ascent toward the place of cure.

Through and around that ascent runs the water. Channels cut from the rock carried the flow of the river and of a sacred spring — the Ydll source named in the Eshmunazar inscription — into a system of basins and ablution pools set through the precinct. A Phoenician inscription found upstream records works to bring the river’s water down to the sanctuary. The logic is plain enough and it is the logic of every healing-shrine of the ancient Mediterranean: the sick came to be washed, to drink, to sleep within reach of the god, and the precinct gave them clean running water as the medium of the cure. When the Greeks later called the river the Asclepius and the grove the sacred wood of Asclepius, they were not imposing a foreign idea; they were translating into their own language a cult of healing waters they recognized.

Two great carved monuments stand at the foot of the podium. One is the so-called throne of Astarte, set in a chapel at the base of the platform. It is a single block of stone — granite, worked in the Egyptian manner — its seat empty, flanked by two sphinxes, with lions couched beside it. The throne held no statue; it was the seat of an unseen presence, the divine power conceived as enthroned and invisible. Thrones of just this kind, sphinx-flanked and vacant, are known from a scatter of Phoenician sanctuaries around Sidon, Tyre, and Umm el-Amed, so the type is securely Phoenician. The attribution of this particular throne to Astarte, however, is an inference, not a label the stone supplies — it rests on inscriptions from the precinct that name Astarte alongside Eshmun and on the presence of a shrine to the goddess below the platform, and it is best held as a scholarly identification rather than a certainty. That the sanctuary of the healer should also be a house of the great goddess is itself worth pausing on: Eshmun does not stand alone here, but in the company of the goddess whom the Sidonian kings served as priests.

The second monument is the tribune, a small marble structure of the fourth century BCE, a little over two meters on each side, carved with Hellenistic reliefs — a frieze of Greek deities, Dionysus among his retinue. It belongs to the late, Hellenized phase of the sanctuary, and it shows the cult absorbing the visual language of the Greek world even as it kept its own god at the center.

But the heart of the place, for anyone who comes to it now, is smaller and quieter. Beside the water channel Dunand found, in 1963 and 1964, a series of votive statues of children — small figures, some life-size, sculpted lying on their side or seated, a number of them holding a bird or a small animal. These were offerings. They were set before Eshmun for the healing or the keeping of a child, left in the god’s house as a body left in his care, a likeness given in thanks or in petition for the living child it stood for. One of them, the figure known as the Baalshillem temple boy, carries a Phoenician inscription naming its royal dedicator and the god — a king’s gift, a son laid before the healer. Nothing in the precinct says more directly what the sanctuary was for. The podium is the architecture of the cult; the children are its purpose. Families came up the terraces, past the running water, to ask the god of health for the one thing no king’s wall could secure, and they left these small stone figures behind them as the record of the asking.

The empty, sphinx-flanked throne at the Temple of Eshmun, attributed to Astarte — one of a Phoenician class of vacant divine thrones. Elie plus, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The god in his house, and the lens of the Greeks

Who was the god the sanctuary served, and how is he distinct from his temple? Eshmun is a deity in his own right — one of the slate of Phoenician powers — and the sanctuary at Bustan el-Sheikh is his house, not his person; the place takes its character from the god, but they are not the same thing, and a Phoenician would not have confused the two. Eshmun was the tutelary god of Sidon, the city’s chief male divinity, and a god of healing and of the renewal of life. His name has been read as “the eighth,” perhaps marking him as the eighth of a group of divine sons, though the etymology is not secure and is best left uncertain. What is clear is his work: he restores, he cures, he gives life back.

The myth attached to him survives only at a distance, in late Greek transmission, and it must be marked as such — it comes down through a summary by the Neoplatonist Damascius, preserved in turn by the Byzantine scholar Photius. In that telling Eshmun was a beautiful youth of Sidon, fond of hunting, whom a goddess — named Astronoe, taken to be a form of the great goddess — pursued in love; fleeing her, the youth maimed himself and died, and the goddess, grieving, warmed him back to life and made him a god, calling him by a name the Greeks rendered as Paean, the Healer. It is a death-and-restoration story, and it is told in Greek dress; how much of it is genuinely old Phoenician matter and how much is the shaping of a Hellenistic mythographer cannot now be separated, and it would be a mistake to read it as the firm scriptural core of the cult. The cult itself, the water and the children, is the surer witness to what Eshmun meant.

The outside world met Eshmun chiefly through translation, and that translation is its own kind of evidence — and its own kind of distortion. To the Greeks, a healing-god with a sanctuary of sacred waters could only be one of their own: a trilingual inscription from Sardinia sets Eshmun beside the Greek Asclepius and the Latin Aesculapius, and Damascius states the equation flatly, that the god the Phoenicians called Eshmun is the one the Greeks interpret as Asclepius. The river below the temple became the Asclepius; the grove became the wood of the healing-god. This interpretatio is a real likeness — both gods cure, both keep sanctuaries of springs and of sleep, both receive the offered images of the sick — but it is also a flattening. Eshmun was the lord of Sidon, bound to a single dynasty of priest-kings, enthroned beside the great goddess, named in the building inscriptions of a state; Asclepius was a Greek hero-god of a different shape. The equation tells us how the Greeks filed Eshmun, not what he was to the Sidonians.

Reception and afterlife

The Temple of Eshmun comes down to the modern world along three separate roads, and they reinforce one another.

The first is epigraphy — the writing of the kings. Because the Sidonian dynasty recorded its temple-building in stone, the sanctuary is one of the few Phoenician holy places whose history can be fixed to named reigns and approximate dates. The foundation inscriptions of Bodashtart concealed in the podium, the sarcophagus text of Eshmunazar II with its catalog of temples built for Astarte, the Lord of Sidon, and Eshmun, and the dedicatory inscription on the temple boy together make the precinct legible as the work of a particular royal house at a particular moment. Where most of Phoenician religion must be reconstructed from hostile or distant outsiders, here the builders speak for themselves, in their own language, about what they raised and for whom.

The second is the excavation. Dunand’s campaigns of 1963 to 1975, building on the earlier Ottoman-era work, turned a half-buried terrace into the most completely understood Phoenician sanctuary anywhere — the one site where the full apparatus of a healing-cult, the podium and the channels and the basins and the offerings, can be walked through rather than guessed at. For the comparative study of Phoenician religion, from the homeland out to the western colonies, Bustan el-Sheikh is the type-site of the temple as the steles of Carthage are the type-site of the tophet. It is the standard against which the cult-places of the Phoenicians abroad — on Sardinia, on Sicily, at the edge of the African shore — are read, and it was placed on the tentative list for World Heritage recognition in 1996 as the best-preserved Phoenician site in Lebanon.

The third road is the throne and the children — the objects themselves, lifted from the ground and set in the National Museum in Beirut and read by anyone who comes after. The sphinx-flanked throne carries the form of Phoenician worship, the seat kept empty for a presence not to be carved. The votive figures carry its content: the plain, urgent business of a parent bringing a sick child to a god who heals. Texts can tell us that Eshmun was a healing-god and that the Greeks called him Asclepius. Only the offered children, laid by the water at the foot of the great podium, tell us what it was to need him — and that is something the inscriptions, for all their precision, never say. The garden of the sheikh keeps the answer the kings’ stones leave out.

See also

• Eshmun — the healing-god to whom the sanctuary was raised
• Sidon — the city whose kings built the temple
• Asclepius — the Greek healing-god to whom Eshmun was matched
• Astarte — the goddess of the sanctuary’s vacant throne
• The Phoenicians and Phoenician religion
• Tyre, Byblos — the sister cities of the coast

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