Baal is known to have had temples at Baalbek, at Tyre, at Tarsus, at Agadir[1123] (Gades), in Sardinia,[1124] at Carthage, and at Ekron.  Though not at first worshipped under a visible form, he came to have statues dedicated to him,[1125] which received the usual honours.  Sometimes, as already observed, his head was encircled with a representation of the solar rays; sometimes his form was assimilated to that under which the Egyptians of later times worshipped their Ammon.  Seated upon a throne and wrapped in a long robe, he presented the appearance of a man in the flower of his age, bearded, and of solemn aspect, with the carved horn of a ram on either side of his forehead.  Figures of rams also supported the arms of his throne on either side, and on the heads of these two supports his hands rested.[1126]

The female deity whose place corresponded to that of Baal in the Phoenician Pantheon, and who was in a certain sense his companion and counterpart, was Ashtoreth or Astarte.  As Baal was the embodiment of the generative principle in nature, so was Ashtoreth of the receptive and productive principle.  She was the great nature-goddess, the Magna Mater, regent of the stars, queen of heaven, giver of life, and source of woman’s fecundity.[1127] Just as Baal had a solar, so she had a lunar aspect, being pictured with horns upon her head representative of the lunar crescent.[1128] Hence, as early as the time of Moses, there was a city on the eastern side of Jordan, named after her, Ashtoreth-Karnaim,[1129] or “Astarte of the two horns.”  Her images are of many forms.  Most commonly she appears as a naked female, with long hair, sometimes gathered into tresses, and with her two hands supporting her two breasts.[1130] Occasionally she is a mother, seated in a comfortable chair, and nursing her babe.[1131] Now and then she is draped, and holds a dove to her breast, or else she takes an attitude of command, with the right hand raised, as if to bespeak attention.  Sometimes, on the contrary, her figure has that modest and retiring attitude which has caused it to be described by a distinguished archaeologist[1132] as “the Phoenician prototype of the Venus de Medici.”  The Greeks and Romans, who identified Baal determinately with their Zeus or Jupiter, found it very much more difficult to fix on any single goddess in their Pantheon as the correspondent of Astarte.  Now they made her Hera or Juno, now Aphrodite or Venus, now Athene, now Artemis, now Selene, now Rhea or Cybele.  But her aphrodisiac character was certainly the one in which she most frequently appeared.  She was the goddess of the sexual passion, rarely, however, represented with the chaste and modest attributes of the Grecian Aphrodite-Urania, far more commonly with those coarser and more repulsive ones which characterise Aphrodite Pandemos.[1133] Her temples were numerous, though perhaps not quite so numerous as those of Baal.  The most famous were those at Sidon, Aphaca, Ashtoreth-Karnaim, Paphos, Pessinus, and Carthage.  At Sidon the kings were sometimes her high-priests;[1134] and her name is found as a frequent element in Phoenician personal names, royal and other:  e.g.—­Astartus, Abdastartus, Delaeastartus, Am-ashtoreth, Bodoster, Bostor, &c.