** The Bostrenos, which is perhaps to be recognised under
     the form Borinos in the Periplus of Scylax, is the modern
     Nahr el-Awaly.

Here, also, an Astarte ruled over the destinies of the people, but a chaste and immaculate Astarte, a self-restrained and warlike virgin, sometimes identified with the moon, sometimes with the pale and frigid morning star.* In addition to this goddess, the inhabitants worshipped a Baal-Sidon, and other divinities of milder character—­an Astarte Shem-Baal, wife of the supreme Baal, and Eshmun, a god of medicine—­each of whom had his own particular temple either in the town itself or in some neighbouring village in the mountain.  Baal delighted in travel, and was accustomed to be drawn in a chariot through the valleys of Phoenicia in order to receive the prayers and offerings of his devotees.  The immodest Astarte, excluded, it would seem, from the official religion, had her claims acknowledged in the cult offered to her by the people, but she became the subject of no poetic or dolorous legend like her namesake at Byblos, and there was no attempt to disguise her innately coarse character by throwing over it a garb of sentiment.  She possessed in the suburbs her chapels and grottoes, hollowed out in the hillsides, where she was served by the usual crowd of Ephebae and sacred courtesans.  Some half-dozen towns or fortified villages, such as Bitziti,** the Lesser Sidon, and Sarepta, were scattered along the shore, or on the lowest slopes of the Lebanon.

* Astarte is represented in the Bible as the goddess of the Sidonians, and she is in fact the object of the invocations addressed to the mistress Deity in the Sidonian inscriptions, the patroness of the town.  Kings and queens were her priests and priestesses respectively.

** Bitziti is not mentioned except in the Assyrian texts, and has been identified with the modern region Ait ez-Zeitun to the south-east of Sidon.  It is very probably the Elaia of Philo of Byblos, the Biais of Dionysios Periegetes, which Renan is inclined to identify with Heldua, Khan-Khaldi, by substituting Eldis as a correction.

Sidonian territory reached its limit at the Cape of Sarepta, where the high-lands again meet the sea at the boundary of one of those basins into which Phoenicia is divided.  Passing beyond this cape, we come first upon a Tyrian outpost, the Town of Birds;* then upon the village of Nazana** with its river of the same name; beyond this upon a plain hemmed in by low hills, cultivated to their summits; then on tombs and gardens in the suburbs of Autu;*** and, further still, to a fleet of boats moored at a short distance from the shore, where a group of reefs and islands furnishes at one and the same time a site for the houses and temples of Tyre, and a protection from its foes.