ey could of the tombs, burying in them again and again, as
the Egyptians were accustomed to do in their cemeteries at Thebes and
Memphis. The surrounding plain is watered by the "pleasant Bostrenos,"
and is covered with gardens which are reckoned to be the most beautiful
in all Syria--at least after those of Damascus: their praises were sung
even in ancient days, and they had then earned for the city the epithet
of "the flowery Sidon."**

* The only description of the port which we possess is that
in the romance of Olitophon and Leucippus by Achilles
Tatius.

** 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 text