Baalat Gebal

Worship

Baalat Gebal was the principal deity in the local pantheon of Byblos, located on the Mediterranean coast in modern Lebanon. She has been described as “the most recurrent character in the history of the city”. She was associated with commerce. A temple dedicated to her was located in the center of the settlement. It remained in use without interruption from the third millennium BCE down to the Roman period. It was the largest sanctuary in Byblos. As it is unlikely that Baalat Gebal had more than one temple in the city, the "Obelisk Temple" also identified during excavations might have been instead dedicated to a male figure connected to her. A number of sheet metal figurines have been discovered as a part of the temple votive offering in the temple of Baalat Gebal. Most are representations of men, either in conical hats or without, while a single one might be depiction of Anubis holding the was scepter. It is commonly assumed that they were produced locally, though it has also been proposed that they were imported from Egypt roughly between 2050 and 1800 BCE due to stylistic parallels with similar objects from Mentuhotep II’s tomb located at Deir el-Bahri.

Baalat Gebal was venerated by the kings of Byblos, possibly as early as in the early Bronze Age, though no individual rulers are identified in sources from that period. Rib-Addi, who reigned during the period documented in the Amarna letters, ended most of the messages he sent to the pharaoh with a wish for Baalat Gebal to protect the latter. Similar formulas appear in his letters to other Egyptian officials. A total of twenty seven instances have been identified. This habit which finds no parallels in the rest of the correspondence belonging to this text corpus. While wishes for wellbeing of the recipient were common, no other local ruler invoked his own local deity to bless the pharaoh. Furthermore, in a single case Rib-Addi presented Baalat Gebal as one of the deities the pharaoh owed his position to, which similarly is not otherwise attested for rulers of Levantine polities. It is not known if he used similar formulas in letters addressed to people from outside Egypt, as no such texts survive. In most cases he only invokes Baalat Gebal, though in a few instances she is paired with the Egyptian god Amun, who in all of these cases occur before her. It is not known how the letters were received, though Marwan Kilani speculates that the frequent references to Baalat Gebal presumably would not be perceived positively by Rib-Addi’s contemporary Akhenaton due to his religious policies. No direct references to this pharaoh’s attitude towards the goddess are known, but during his reign Byblos was not recognized in Egyptian sources as a religious center of particular importance, and played no role in what Kilani deems “Atonist ideology”.

In one letter Rib-Addi mentions a certain Ummaḫnu, the “maidservant” of Baalat Gebal, presumed to be her priestess. Apparently she attempted to play a role in the city’s foreign relations, which finds no parallel in the cases of any other religious personnel mentioned in the Amarna letters. This situation was accepted by the king, who tried to act as a middleman between the supposed priestess and the pharaoh, who she wanted to contact. Marwan Kilani notes that in contrast with sources from Egypt and Mesopotamia, references to female clergy are rare in texts from Bronze Age West Semitic speaking areas, and suggests that the fact that Byblos’ tutelary deity was a goddess rather than a god might be the reason behind Ummaḫnu’s relative prominence.

Multiple first millennium BCE kings of Byblos, including Abibaal, Elibaal and Shipitbaal, referred to themselves as protected by Baalat Gebal. Elibaal dedicated a stele to her, as indicated by the surviving inscription of this object, in which he addresses her as “his mistress”. Shipitbaal in own inscription asked her for a long reign. Another king of Byblos, Yehawmilk, who reigned in the fifth century BCE, similarly hoped Baalat Gebal would grant him a long life and reign.

Egyptian reception

There is evidence that Egyptians were involved in the cult of Baalat Gebal in Byblos. Egypt and Byblos had a long history of interactions dating back to the third millennium BCE, as recognized by local rulers such as Rib-Addi, who at one point wrote that “Byblos is not like those other cities. Byblos has been my lord the king’s loyal city from time immemorial” in a letter sent to the pharaoh. It is assumed that the temple of Baalat Gebal played a role in the political interactions between them.

An Old Kingdom relief with an Egyptian inscription referring to a monarch whose name is not preserved as the “beloved of Hathor, Lady of Byblos” has been identified during excavations of the temple of Baalat Gebal. A dedication to the same deity has also been found in the so-called Temple of the Obelisks, where it was presumably reused in the Middle Bronze Age. An inscription on a stone table from the former of the two temples mentions an endowment on her behalf made during the reign of Pepi I of the Sixth Dynasty. Later texts, dated to the reign of Thutmose III, allude to Egyptian involvement in the maintenance of her temple. The pharaoh himself mentions her in on a stela from the temple of Amun in Jebel Barkal in Nubia, which commemorates the construction of ships for a military campaign in the north from wood from the “neighborhood of the Lady of Byblos.” A reference to her might also be present in a damaged text found in the Theban tomb of one of his officials, Senneferi, which describes an expedition to Byblos. Andrés Diego Espinel notes that the Egyptian acts of devotion to Baalat Gebal might have been one of the means to secure favorable political and economic relations with local rulers, as Byblos was a major center of trade and a source of wood, oil, wine and lapis lazuli imported to Egypt.

It is presumed that Baalat Gebal was worshiped in some capacity in Egypt as well. The translation of her name, nbt-kbn, is attested as a given name, with one of its bearers being the nurse of one of Ahmose I’s daughters. Oldest examples have been identified in texts from the Middle Kingdom. It is not known if families of any of the women named nkt-kbn originated in Byblos, or if the choice of this name was influenced by the Egyptian worship of Baalat Gebal.

Miscellaneous attestations

A reference to Baalat Gebal has been identified in the satirical Egyptian text known as Letter of Hori, possibly originally composed during the reign of Ramesses II, in which the eponymous figure discusses her cult center: “I will tell you of another mysterious city. Byblos is its name; what is it like? And their goddess, what is she like?” According to Marwan Kilani, is not certain if describing Byblos as “mysterious” (or alternatively: “hidden”) is an allusion to an unknown mystical or religious event, or a sarcastic figure of speech meant to highlight that the average scribe should be familiar with the city.

Baalat Gebal is also mentioned twice in a collection of Egyptian incantations, most of them directed against snakes, from the reign of Ramesses XI (BM EA 9997 + 1030). In the sixth of the preserved texts, which describes Isis healing her son Horus, who is portrayed as a child and has been bitten by a snake, she is invoked to heal the poison alongside other goddesses, such as Nephthys and Serket. Based on a restored damaged passage she is most likely identified with Hathor in this context.

For unknown reasons, Baalat Gebal is entirely absent from the Story of Wenamun, even though it describes a journey to Byblos. An implicit reference to her might only be present in the description of a sacrifice to the local deities.

In the Phoenician History of Philo of Byblos, which he presents as a Greek a translation of the works of a Phoenician author, Sanchuniathon, but which modern researchers consider to be a combination of both Phoenician and Greco-Roman elements, Baalat Gebal is referred to as Dione. Ouranos sends her and her two sisters, Astarte and Rhea, to trick and defeat their brother Kronos, but the latter instead marries them, and they subsequently give birth to his children. Ouranos most likely stands for a Phoenician deity representing heaven. Rhea is not explicitly identified with any Phoenician deity, and might be the Greek goddess. Kronos is also referred to as El elsewhere in the Phoenician History, but there is no other evidence for a consort relation between Baalat Gebal and El, and the pairing of Dione and Kronos is also unusual from Greek perspective, as the goddess bearing this name was typically associated with Zeus instead. The number and names of Dione’s children are not preserved. Later on, when Kronos assigns cities to various deities, she receives Byblos as her domain.

The temple of Baalat Gebal is mentioned in Lucian’s De Dea Syria. She is referred to as the “Byblian Aphrodite” (Greek: Ἀφροδίτης Βυβλίης). Lucian states that in Roman times rites focused on Adonis took place in her temple, which might be an echo of the worship of a possible unidentified male deity related to her, who according to Marwan Kilani was associated with the Obelisk Temple in earlier periods.