The aim of this book is to make Lucian's A True Story accessible to intermediate students of Ancient Greek. The running vocabulary and commentary are meant to provide everything necessary to read each page. Lucian's A True Story is a great text for intermediate readers. Its breathless narrative does not involve many complex sentences or constructions; there is some unusual vocabulary and a few departures from Attic Greek, but for the most part it is a straightforward narrative that is fun and interesting by one of antiquity's cleverest authors. In A True Story, Lucian parodies accounts of fanciful adventures and travel to incredible places by authors such as Ctesias and Iambulus. The story's combination of mockery and learning makes it an excellent example of the Greek literature of the imperial period. Revised August, 2014.

THE dawn of history in all parts of Western Asia discloses the established worship of a nature-goddess in whom the productive powers of the earth were personified. She is our Mother Earth, known otherwise as the Mother Goddess or Great Mother.

On the Syrian Goddess is a Greek treatise of the second century AD which describes religious cults practiced at the temple of Hierapolis Bambyce, now Manbij, in Syria. Not only does it acknowledge that at one time a paramount Goddess was worshipped in the regions of the Ancient Near East, it goes into detail of the practices of her devotees which later generations considered reprehensible. The book describes the worship as being of a phallic character, with votaries offering little male figures of wood and bronze. There were also huge phalli set up like obelisks before the temple, which were ceremoniously climbed once a year and decorated. The treatise begins with a re-telling of the Atrahasis flood myth where floodwaters are drained through a small cleft in the rock under the temple. Nonetheless, On the Syrian Goddess played an important role in the development of modern Neopaganism.

On the Syrian Goddess is a Greek treatise of the second century AD which describes religious cults practiced at the temple of Hierapolis Bambyce, now Manbij, in Syria. Not only does it acknowledge that at one time a paramount Goddess was worshipped in the regions of the Ancient Near East, it goes into detail of the practices of her devotees which later generations considered reprehensible. The book describes the worship as being of a phallic character, with votaries offering little male figures of wood and bronze. There were also huge phalli set up like obelisks before the temple, which were ceremoniously climbed once a year and decorated. The treatise begins with a re-telling of the Atrahasis flood myth where floodwaters are drained through a small cleft in the rock under the temple. Nonetheless, On the Syrian Goddess played an important role in the development of modern Neopaganism.

From the tragic young Adonis to Zašhapuna, first among goddesses, this handbook provides the most complete information available on deities from the cultures and religions of the ancient Near East, including Anatolia, Syria, Israel, Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria, and Elam. The result of nearly fifteen years of research, this handbook is more expansive and covers a wider range of sources and civilizations than any previous reference works on the topic. Arranged alphabetically, the entries range from multiple pages of information to a single line—sometimes all that we know about a given deity. Where possible, each record discusses the deity’s symbolism and imagery, connecting it to the myths, rituals, and festivals described in ancient sources. Many of the entries are accompanied by illustrations that aid in understanding the iconography, and they all include references to texts in which the god or goddess is mentioned. Appropriate for both trained scholars and nonacademic readers, this book collects centuries of Near Eastern mythology into one volume. It will be an especially valuable resource for anyone interested in Assyriology, ancient religion, and the ancient Near East.

This book proposes a new means of identifying how Greek and Syrian identities were expressed in the Hellenistic and Roman Near East.

Subject of this book is the god Dagan (biblical Dagon), the principal deity of the Middle Euphrates region. Lluís Feliu, carefully analysing the sources from Ebla and Mari for the third millennium, from Mari for the Old Babylonian period and from Emar and Ugarit for the Middle Babylonian period, here gives a meticulous diachronic survey of the divine subject. A final chapter summarizes the results in describing the character of Dagan, his origin and his area of influence. Of particular interest to Assyriologists, to biblical scholars and to comparative religionists.

'Ex Asia et Syria: Religions in the Roman Central Balkans' examines the cults of Asia Minor and Syrian origin in the Roman provinces of the Central Balkans. The author analyzes all hitherto known epigraphical and archaeological material attesting to the presence of the cults in that region, a subject yet to be the object of serious scholarly study.

For as long as we have sought god, we have found the goddess. Ruling over the imaginations of humankind’s earliest agricultural civilizations, she played a critical spiritual role as a keeper of nature’s fertile powers and an assurance of the next sustaining harvest. In The Goddess, David Leeming and Christopher Fee take us all the way back into prehistory, tracing the goddess across vast spans of time to tell the epic story of the transformation of belief and what it says about who we are. Leeming and Fee use the goddess to gaze into the lives and souls of the people who worshipped her. They chart the development of traditional Western gender roles through an understanding of the transformation of concepts of the Goddess from her earliest roots in India and Iran to her more familiar faces in Ireland and Iceland. They examine the subordination of the goddess to the god as human civilizations became mobile and began to look upon masculine deities for assurances of survival in movement and battle. And they show how, despite this history, the goddess has remained alive in our spiritual imaginations, in figures such as the Christian Virgin Mother and, in contemporary times, the new-age resurrection of figures such as Gaia. The Goddess explores this central aspect of ancient spiritual thought as a window into human history and the deepest roots of our beliefs.