The Phoenician Religion, as in many other ancient cultures, was an inseparable part of everyday life. Gods such as Baal, Astarte, and Melqart had temples built in their name, offerings and sacrifices were regularly made to them, royalty performed as their high priests, and even ships carried their representations. Influenced by their predecessors and neighbours, the Phoenicians would spread their beliefs around the Mediterranean wherever they traded and established colonies, and their religion would continue to evolve and be perpetuated by their greatest colony of all, Carthage.
SOURCES
The details of the mythology, gods, and practices of the religion of the Phoenicians are few and far between because of the scarcity of surviving written records. These are principally from inscriptions excavated at various Phoenician cities as no single religious work such as a Phoenician equivalent of the Bible has survived, if there were ever one in the first place. Secondary sources, written long after the original Phoenician cities had declined, include snippets from Plutarch and Lucian, and surviving fragments of the work of the 1st-century CE historian Philo of Byblos, who himself quoted extensively from an earlier work by the Phoenician priest Sanchuniathon from Berytus. Once thought to be a mythical figure, archaeological excavations at Ugarit suggest that Sanchuniathon did actually exist.
Later historians such as the 5th-century Neo-Platonist Damascius quote the work of Mochus who wrote a history of Phoenicia but the original is now lost. There are also descriptions of the religious practices in the colonies of Phoenicia such as Carthage but these may well have absorbed local traditions and evolved over time so that a direct comparison with the original cities of Phoenicia may be problematic. Finally, there are passages within the Old Testament in which the Phoenicians are referred to as the Canaanites, where they are portrayed in a particularly negative light, as they are in Roman sources eager to portray the defeated Carthaginians and their Phoenician founders as wholly uncivilized and debauched.
THE GOD MELQART REPRESENTED THE MONARCHY, THE SEA, HUNTING, AND COLONIZATION.
MAIN PHOENICIAN GODS
Although the historical sources present some difficulties of interpretation, the Phoenician Religion was remarkably constant, almost certainly due to the geography of the region where the Phoenicians were contained on the narrow coast of the Levant and backed by the mountains creating a border with their Aramaean and Hebrew neighbours. This is not to say it was uniform throughout the region as ancient Phoenicia was very much a collection of individual city-states rather than a single homogenous state. Each city had its chief god and pantheon for example, although some, such as Astarte, were worshipped throughout Phoenicia. The mythology of the origin of the world from the union of the primeval elements of Wind and Desire, followed by creatures hatched from an egg, which in turn generate humanity, also seems a common element in various cities’ creation mythology. Beyond the big three cities of Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre, however, little is known of the religious practices at other Phoenician cities.
BYBLOS
El, Baalat, and Adonis were particularly worshipped at Byblos. El was of Semitic origin and, although equated with Eliun in the Bible, was a separate deity. He was important but not especially active in the daily life of the Phoenicians which led the Greeks to equate him with their Cronus. Baalat was a female deity associated with the earth and fertility. She is often referred to as Baalat Gebal or ‘Lady Baalat of Byblos’ and frequently mentioned in inscriptions where she is appealed to by kings so that their reign may be a successful one. Altars and monuments constructed from precious metals were dedicated to her. Her equivalents in other Near Eastern cultures were Ishtar, Innin, and Isis. Adonis is familiar from Greek mythology, and he represented for the Phoenicians the annual cycle of nature. Again he shares some characteristics with deities from neighbouring cultures, notably Osiris in Egypt and Tammuz of Babylon and Assyria.
