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Atargatis or Ataratheh (; ) was the chief goddess of northern Syria in Classical Antiquity.〔 Ctesias also used the name Derceto for her,〔Strabo 16.785; Pliny, ''Natural History'' 5.81.〕 and the Romans called her Dea Syriae ("Syrian goddess"). Primarily she was a goddess of fertility, but, as the ''baalat'' ("mistress") of her city and people, she was also responsible for their protection and well-being. Her chief sanctuary was at Hierapolis, modern Manbij, northeast of Aleppo, Syria. She is sometimes described as a mermaid-goddess, due to identification of her with a fish-bodied goddess at Ascalon. However, there is no evidence that Atargatis was worshipped at Ascalon, and all iconographic evidence shows her as anthropomorphic.〔Drijvers ''Dea Syria'' ''LIMC''. The modern repertory of literary allusions to her is Paul Louis van Berg, ''Corpus Cultus Deae Syriae (C.C.D.S.): les sources littéraires'', Part I: ''Répertoire des sources grecques et latines''; Part II: ''Études critiques des sources mythologiques grecques et latines'' (Leiden:Brill) 1973.〕 Michael Rostovtzeff called her "the great mistress of the North Syrian lands".〔M. Rostovtseff, "Hadad and Atargatis at Palmyra", ''American Journal of Archeology'' 37 (January 1933), pp 58-63, examining Palmyrene stamped tesserae.〕 Her consort is usually Hadad. As Ataratheh, doves and fish were considered sacred by her: doves as an emblem of the Love-Goddess, and fish as symbolic of the fertility and life of the waters. According to a third-century Syriac source, "In Syria and in Urhâi () the men used to castrate themselves in honor of Taratha. But when King Abgar became a Christian, he commanded that anyone who emasculated himself should have a hand cut off. And from that day to the present no one in Urhâi emasculates himself anymore." ==Name and origin== The name ''Atargatis'' derives from the Aramaic form ''‘Atar‘atheh'', which comes in several variants. At Hierapolis Bambyce (Manbij) on coins of about the 4th century BCE, the legend ''tr‘th'' appears, for Atar'ate'', and ''tr‘th mnbgyb'' in a Nabataean inscription; at Kafr Yassif near Akko an altar is inscribed "to Adado and Atargatis, the gods who listen to prayer";〔These instances are noted in Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, Pieter Willem van der Horst, ''Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible'', (1995:''s.v.'' "Hadad"); the name also appears in the ''Talmud'' ("Ab. Zarah" 11b, line 28) as ''tr‘th''.〕 and the full name ''‘tr‘th'' appears on a bilingual inscription found in Palmyra. ‘Atar‘atheh is seen as a continuation of Bronze Age goddesses. At Ugarit, cuneiform tablets attest the three great Canaanite goddesses 'Aṭirat (Asherah) — described as a fecund "Lady Goddess of the Sea" (''rabbatu at̪iratu yammi'') — ‘Anat (Anat, Anath), and ‘Ațtart (Astarte), who shared many traits with each other and may have been worshiped in conjunction or separately during 1500 years of cultural history.〔Robert A. Oden, Jr, "The Persistence of Canaanite Religion" ''The Biblical Archaeologist'' 39.1 (March 1976, pp. 31-36) p. 34; "the name of the Hellenistic and Roman goddess Atargatis was a compound of Astarte and Anat", JAB simply states in Piotr Bienkowski, Alan Ralph Millard , eds. ''Dictionary of the Ancient Near East'', (2000:''s.v.'' "Anat").〕 The name ''‘Atar‘atheh'' is widely held to derive from a compound of the Aramaic form ''‘Attar'', which is a cognate of ''‘Ațtart'' minus its feminine suffix ''-t'', and ''‘Attah'' or ''‘Atā'', a cognate of ''Anat''. (Cognates of Ugaritic ''‘Ațtart'' include Phoenician ''‘Aštart'' — Hellenized as ''Astarte'' — Old Testament Hebrew ''‘Aštoreth'', and Himyaritic ''‘Athtar''. Compare the cognate Akkadian form ''Ištar''.) Alternatively, the second half may be a Palmyrene divine name ''‘Athe'' (i.e. ''tempus opportunum''), which occurs as part of many compounds.〔''Encyclopædia Britannica'' (1910; Hugh Chisholm, ed.), s.v. "(Atargatis )", page 823.〕 It has also been proposed that the element ''-gatis'' may relate to the Greek ''gados'' "fish".〔Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, ''A Greek-English Lexicon'', ''s.v.'' "Atargatis" ((Perseus.org on-line text ))〕 (For example, the Greek name for "sea monster" or "whale" is the cognate term ''ketos''). So ''Atar-Gatis'' may simply mean "the fish-goddess Atar". 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Atargatis」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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