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The name appears in the Talmud ("Ab. Zarah" 11b, line 28) as tr‘th. The full name ‘tr‘th appears on a bilingual inscription found in Palmyra and on coins.

The name ‘Atar‘atah is a compound of two divine names: the first part is a form of the Ugaritic ‘Athtart, Himyaritic ‘Athtar, the equivalent of the Old Testament ‘Ashtoreth, the Phoenician Ashtart rendered in Greek as Astarte. The feminine ending -t has been omitted. Compare the cognate Akkadian form Ishtar. The second half is a Palmyrene divine name Athe (i.e. tempus opportunum), which occurs as part of many compounds.

As a consequence of the first half of the name, Atargatis has frequently, though wrongly, been identified as ‘Ashtart. The two deities were probably of common origin and have many features in common, but their cults are historically distinct. We find reference to an Atargateion or Atergateion, a temple of Atargatis) at Carnion in Gilead (cf. 1 Maccabees 5.43), but the home of the goddess was unquestionably not Palestine, but Syria proper, especially at Hierapolis, where she had a great temple.

From Syria her worship extended to Greece and to the furthest west. Lucian and ApuleiusLucius Apuleius ca 123/ 5 CE ca 180 CE), an utterly Romanized Berber who described himself as "half- Numidian half- Gaetulian", is remembered most for his bawdy picaresque Latin novel the Metamorphoses better known as The Golden Ass''. He was born in Mada give descriptions of the beggar-priests who went round the great cities with an image of the goddess on an ass and collected money. The wide extension of the cult is attributable largely to Syrian merchants; thus we find traces of it in the great seaport towns; at DelosThe island of Delos ( Greek: , Dhilos , isolated in the centre of the roughly circular ring of islands called the Cyclades, near Mykonos, had a position as a holy sanctuary for a millennium before Olympian Greek mythology made it the birthplace of Apollo especially numerous inscriptions have been found bearing witness to its importance. Again we find the cult in SicilySicily Sicilia in Italian) is an autonomous region of Italy and the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, with an area of 25,700 sq. 1 million inhabitants. Towns and Cities Sicily's principal cities include the regional capital Palermo, together with t, introduced, no doubt, by slaves and mercenary troops, who carried it even to the farthest northern limits of the Roman empire. In many cases Atargatis and ‘Ashtart and other goddesses who once had independent cults and mythologies became fused to such an extent as to be indistinguishable.

This fusion is exemplified by the Carnion temple, which is probably identical with the famous temple of ‘Ashtart at Ashtaroth-Karnaim. Atargatis generally appears as the wife of Hadad. They are the protecting deities of the community. Atargatis, wears a mural crown, is the ancestor the royal house, the founder of social and religious life, the goddess of generation and fertility (hence the prevalence of phallic emblems), and the inventor of useful appliances. Not unnaturally she is identified with the Greek AphroditeAphrodite (φροδτη, "risen from sea-foam") is the Greek goddess of love and beauty. Worship The epithet Aphrodite Acidalia was occasionally added to her name, after the spring she used to bathe in, located in Boeotia ( Virgil. By the conjunction of these many functions, she becomes ultimately a great Nature-goddess, analogous to CybeleOriginally a Phrygian goddess, Cybele (sometimes given the etymology "she of the hair" if her name is Greek, not Phrygian) ( Roman equivalent: Magna Mater or 'Great Mother') was the Earth Mother goddess who was worshipped in Anatolia from Neolithic times. and RheaRhea was the giantess daughter of Uranus and of Gaia. She was both sister and wife to Cronus and mother to Demeter, Hades, Hera, Hestia, Poseidon, and Zeus. She was strongly associated with Cybele. In Roman mythology, she was Magna Mater deorum Idaea.; in one aspect she typifies the protection of water in producing life; in another, the universal of other-earth ( MacrobiusAmbrosius Theodosius Macrobius Roman grammarian and philosopher, flourished during the reigns of Honorius and Arcadius ( 395- 423). He himself states that he was not a Roman, but there is no certain evidence whether he was of Greek or perhaps African desc, Saturn. 1.23); in a third (influenced, no doubt, by ChaldeanChaldean is the name given to the ancient language Urartian also known as Vannic. It was the official language of Urartu spoken in northeastern Anatolia in the 9th 6th centuries BCE. It along with Hurrian are thought to be descended from the same language astrology), the power of destiny.

The legends are numerous and of an astrological character. An account for the Syrian dove-worship and abstinence from fish is seen in the story in Athenaeus 8.37, where Atargatis is explained to mean "without Gatis", the name of a queen who is said to have forbidden the eating of fish. Thus Diodorus Siculus (2.4.2) quoting Ctesias, tells how Derceto fell in love with a youth and became by him the mother of a child and how in shame Derceto flung herself into a lake near Ascalon and her body was changed into the form of a fish though her head remained human. Derceto's child grew up to become Semiramis, the Assyrian queen. In another story told by Hyginus, an egg fell from the sky into the Euphrates, was rolled onto land by fish, doves settled on it and hatched it, and Venus, known as the Syrian goodess, came forth.

This entry was based on material from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.