horns, vulture head-dress and papyrus-sceptre. The
inscription records the dedication of an altar and shrine to the
goddess, and these too we may conjecture were fashioned on Egyptian
lines.

(1) _Corp. Inscr. Semit._, I. i, tab. II.

(2) _C.I.S._, I. i, tab. I.

The representation of Semitic deities under Egyptian forms and with
Egyptian attributes was encouraged by the introduction of their cults
into Egypt itself. In addition to Astarte of Byblos, Ba'al, Anath, and
Reshef were all borrowed from Syria in comparatively early times and
given Egyptian characters. The conical Syrian helmet of Reshef, a god
of war and thunder, gradually gave place to the white Egyptian crown,
so that as Reshpu he was represented as a royal warrior; and Qadesh,
another form of Astarte, becoming popular with Egyptian women as
a patroness of love and fecundity, was also sometimes modelled on
Hathor.(1)

(1) See W. Max Mueller, _Egyptological Researches_, I, p. 32
f., pl. 41, and S. A. Cook, _Religion of Ancient Palestine_,
pp. 83 ff.

Semitic colonists on the Egyptian border were ever ready to adopt
Egyptian symbolism in delineating the native gods to whom they owed
allegiance, and a particularly striking example of this may be seen on
a stele of the Persian period preserved in the Cairo Museum.(1) It was
found at Tell Defenneh, on the right bank of the Pelusiac branch of the
Nile, close to the old Egyptian highway into Syria, a site which may be
identified with that of the biblical Tahpanhes and the Daphnae of the
Greeks. Here it was that the Jewish fugitives, fleeing with Jeremiah
after the fall of Jerusalem, founded a Jewish colony beside a
flourishing Phoenician and Aramaean settlement. One of the local gods of
Tahpanhes is represented on the Cairo monument, an Egyptian stele in the
form of a naos with the winged solar disk upon its frieze. He stands
on the back of a lion and is clothed in Asiatic costume with the high
Syrian tiara crowning his abundant hair. The Syrian workmanship is
obvious, and the Syrian character of the cult may be recognized in such
details as the small brazen fire-altar before the god, and the sacred
pillar which is being anointed by the officiating priest. But the god
holds in his left hand a purely Egyptian sceptre and in his right an
emblem as purely Babylonian, the weapon of Marduk and Gilgamesh which
was also wielded by early Sumerian kings.

(1) Mueller, op. cit., p. 30 f