rdfs:comment
| - Atargatis, in Aramaic ‘Atar‘atah, was a Syrian deity, "the great mistress of the North Syrian lands" Rostovtseff called her, commonly known to the ancient Greeks by a shortened form of the name, Derceto or Derketo and as Dea Syria, "Goddess of Syria", occasionally rendered in one word Deasura. She is often now popularly described as the mermaid-goddess, from her fish-bodied appearance at Ascalon and in Diodorus Siculus — a widely accessible source — but which is by no means her universal appearance.
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abstract
| - Atargatis, in Aramaic ‘Atar‘atah, was a Syrian deity, "the great mistress of the North Syrian lands" Rostovtseff called her, commonly known to the ancient Greeks by a shortened form of the name, Derceto or Derketo and as Dea Syria, "Goddess of Syria", occasionally rendered in one word Deasura. She is often now popularly described as the mermaid-goddess, from her fish-bodied appearance at Ascalon and in Diodorus Siculus — a widely accessible source — but which is by no means her universal appearance. Her consort is usually Hadad. As Ataratha she may be recognized by the self-mutilation of her votaries, recorded in a perhaps sensationalist Christian passage from the Book of the Laws of the Countries, one of the oldest works of Syriac prose, an early-third-century product of the school of Bar Daisan (Bardesanes): "In Syria and in Urhâi [Edessa] the men used to castrate themselves in honor of Ataratha. But when King Abgar became a believer, 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." —Chapter 45.
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