The other principal Phoenician deities were El, Melkarth, Dagon, Hadad, Adonis, Sydyk, Eshmun, the Cabeiri, Onca, Tanith, Tanata, or Anaitis, and Baalith, Baaltis, or Beltis.  El, or Il, originally a name of the Supreme God, became in the later Phoenician mythology a separate and subordinate divinity, whom the Greeks compared to their Kronos[1135] and the Romans to their Saturn.  El was the special god of Gebal or Byblus,[1136] and was worshipped also with peculiar rites at Carthage.[1137] He was reckoned the son of Uranus and the father of Beltis, to whom he delivered over as her especial charge the city of Byblus.[1138] Numerous tales were told of him.  While reigning on earth as king of Byblus, or king of Phoenicia, he had fallen in love with a nymph of the country, called Anobret, by whom he had a son named Ieoud.  This son, much as he loved him, when great dangers from war threatened the land, he first invested with the emblems of royalty, and then sacrificed.[1139] Uranus (Heaven) married his sister Ge (Earth), and Il or Kronos was the issue of this marriage, as also were Dagon, Baetylus, and Atlas.  Ge, being dissatisfied with the conduct of her husband, induced her son Kronos to make war upon him, and Kronos, with the assistance of Hermes, overcame Uranus, and having driven him from his kingdom succeeded to the imperial power.  Besides sacrificing Ieoud, Kronos murdered another of his sons called Sadid, and also a daughter whose name is not given.  Among his wives were Astarte, Rhea, Dione, Eimarmene, and Hora, of whom the first three were his sisters.[1140] There is no need to pursue this mythological tangle.  If it meant anything to the initiated, the meaning is wholly lost; and the stories, gravely as they are related by the ancient historian, to the modern, who has no key to them, are almost wholly valueless.

Originally, Melkarth would seem to have been a mere epithet, representing one aspect of Baal.  The word is formed from the two roots melek and kartha[1141] (= Heb. kiriath, “city"), and means “King of the City,” or “City King,” which Baal was considered to be.  But the two names in course of time drifted apart, and Melicertes, in Philo Byblius, has no connection at all with Baal-samin.[1142] The Greeks, who identified Baal with their Zeus, viewed Melkarth as corresponding to their Heracles, or Hercules; and the later Phoenicians, catching at this identification, represented Melkarth under the form of a huge muscular man, with a lion’s skin and sometimes with a club.[1143] Melkarth was especially worshipped at Tyre, of which city he was the tutelary deity, at Thasos, and at Gades.  Herodotus describes the temple of Hercules at Tyre, and attributes to it an antiquity of 2,300 years before his own time.[1144] He also visited a temple dedicated to the same god at Thasos.[1145] With Gades were connected the myths of Hercules’ expedition to the west, of his erection of the pillars, his defeat of Chrysaor