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

Semitic Gods at Alasia in the 12th-11th centuries before our era.

During my communication before the Philological and Scientific Society of Famagusta, on the occasion of its jubilee session of 16 October 1969, presided over by Dr. Kyriakos Hadjioannou, I had drawn attention to the revolution profound which occurred in the religious thought of the population settled at 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.E. Whereas in the preceding century, which saw the disappearance of the Cypro-Mycenaean civilisation, religious thought was still dominated, as during the 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, adopted then. Some of these deities were known on the Island as early as the 14th c. B.C.E., in particular the formidable Nergal-Reshef, Babylonian and Syrian god, lord of the underground kingdom of the dead. In a letter to the Pharaoh Amenophis IV (1377 to1358), found in the diplomatic archives of Tell el Amarna, the king of Cyprus, a name still unknown, designates this god as responsible for a serious epidemic which 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 has 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, a form under which this metal, drawn from the mountains of Cyprus, was then sold to the metallurgists of the Island, or exported by sea to most of the countries bordering the Mediterranean eastern and central, from Anatolia in the East, as far as Italy and its islands in the West.

We owe to the same excavations the 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 god and athletic, dressed in a Syrian loincloth and wearing a cap of sheepskin fitted with bull's horns, of which your President, in a recent study, has confirmed the identification with Apollo Keretas, protector of livestock, fig. ...