Semitic Gods at Alasia in the 12th and 11th Centuries before the Common EraClaude Frédéric-Armand Schaeffer

Semitic Gods at Alasia in the XII-XIe centuries B.C.

During my lecture before the Philological and Scientific Society of Famagusta, on the occasion of its jubilee session of 16 October 1969, presided over by Dr. Kyriakos Hadjionannou, I had drawn attention to the profound revolution that occurred in the religious thought of the population settled in Cyprus after the occupation of the island by the Peoples of the North and of the Sea, at the beginning of the 12th c. B.C. While in the preceding century, which saw the disappearance of the Cypro-Mycenaean civilization, religious thought was still dominated, as during prehistoric periods, by belief in the mother-goddess, guarantor of the continuity and development of the populations, it was male deities that the Cypriots of the north-east coastal regions of the island, and in particular of the great metropolis of Alasia near Famagusta, then adopted. Some of these deities were known on the island as early as the 14th c. B.C., in particular the formidable Nergal-Reshef, Babylonian and Syrian god, master of the underworld kingdom of the dead. In a letter to Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (1377 to1358), found in the diplomatic archives of Tell el Amarna, the king of Cyprus, whose name is still unknown, designates this god as responsible for a severe epidemic that decimated the population of his country and caused the death, in his very palace, of one of his sons.

A recent discovery at Enkomi-Alasia revealed to us the appearance of this god as the Cypriots imagined him at the beginning of the 12th c., fig. .... He is a helmeted and armed god standing on a copper ingot, the form in which this metal, drawn from the mountains of Cyprus, was then sold to the island's metalworkers, or exported by sea to most of the countries bordering the eastern and central Mediterranean, from Anatolia in the E., to Italy and its islands in the W.

We owe to the same excavations our knowledge of four other deities of the same period of occupation of the island by the Peoples of the North and of the Sea, in the 12th c.: the Syrian god of fertility and rain, Baal, fig. ...., a young athletic god, dressed in a Syrian loincloth and wearing a sheepskin cap fitted with bull's horns, whose identification with Apollo Kereatas, protector of cattle, your President confirmed in a recent study, fig. ...