Page 62 - Edessa, 'The Blessed City'-01, by J. B. Segal (Oxford, 1970). Chapters 1-3

RELIGION 49
fish of immense size, sacred to Atargatis. The fish were never eaten; some
were so tame, relates Lucian, that they came when summoned by name, and
one carried a design in gold on its fin. In the middle of the lake was an altar
to which devotees of the goddess swam and performed religious ceremonies.
The lake was visited on solemn occasions by the deities, led by Hera. There
was a lake of sacred fish at the temple of Atargatis at Delos, and similar
lakes were to be found at other temples in Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, and
elsewhere; Xenophon in the Anabasis remarks on the lake of fish that he
visited by the Chalys near Aleppo.1 Aelian, who was a contemporary of
Bardaisan, alludes to a legend that Hera bathed at a source of the Khabur
after her union with Zeus; there, we are told, the air is always fragrant, and
tame fish leap (oxipTcoaiv) in shoals. Not far away in modern times is a small
lake of sacred fish at the main source of the Balikh, 'Ain al-'Arus, also called
after Abraham 'Ain Khalil al-Rahman, fifty kilometres south-south-east of
Urfa; nearby are two springs, to which are attributed healing qualities.
Twenty kilometres east of 'Ain al-'Arus is another source of the Balikh called
'Ain Seloq.
In the temple courtyard at Hierapolis roamed tame lions, bears, eagles,
horses, and great oxen. The beginning of spring was marked by the most
important festival of the year, of which examples may be found elsewhere in
the Near East, a circumambulation of images of deities, and then the solemn
conflagration of trees to which offerings of animals and garments and pre-
cious metal had been attached. Curious and apparently without parallel was
the Hierapolitan rite of two wooden columns, some sixty metres high
(according to Lucian) at the entrance of the Temple to the north. Lucian
ascribes to them phallic significance. One carried inscriptions dedicated,
Lucian tells us, by Dionysos to Hera. Twice a year a man, with a rope around
his waist, would climb one of the columns, mounting as one climbs a date-
palm in Arabia or Egypt, with the help of projections up the height of the
column. Having arrived at the top, he would lower another rope and hoist
up wood, clothing, and other objects in which he sat 'as it were in a nest'.
He remained on the summit for seven days, and made supplication—for what
is uncertain; either that no flood should come again upon the earth or for the
welfare of the people, especially for the devout who brought gifts to the foot
of the column. If this phalkbates fell asleep he would be roused to his
duties by a scorpion.
At Palmyra and at Dura we have evidence of the reverence paid to the
dead. Outside the city walls were grottoes in which the dead were buried;
the wealthy erected for themselves funerary towers, some several storeys
high. The dead, mummified and often with death masks, were laid on loculi.
These tombs, or houses of eternity, sometimes had inscriptions cursing the
1 See especially F. J. Dolger, Der heilige Fisch, 1922.
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