A Temple to Astarte "Aglaia": Navigating Phoenician Maritime Religion (20 min)

Presenters

Mara McNiff, University of Texas at Austin

Abstract

Astarte has been widely studied as a deity of sexuality, fertility, warfare, and violence. She is also, however, at the center of an intricate tapestry held between Phoenician religious ideology and seafaring practice. Astarte’s maritime significance is made clear in the many coastal shrines dedicated to the goddess, as well as her convergence with Aphrodite. Perhaps nowhere is the deity’s maritime role more apparent than at the Phoenician settlement of Motya. In addition to the recent finding of a Greek inscription identifying Astarte with the epithet Aglaia, the orientation of her shrine with the nearby Mt. Eryx—home to the indigenous cult of Aphrodite Ericyna—shows how Astarte’s cult at Motya developed within a polyvalent ritual landscape mediating religious interaction between Greeks, Phoenicians, and local populations in ancient Sicily. This paper contextualizes these recent findings from Motya in order to situate Astarte’s worship within the broader network of maritime religious practice.

I first discuss the development of Astarte’s cult in Motya. Applying a holistic reconstruction of the ritual performance, next I trace the early establishment of Astarte’s cult at Motya, identifying and analyzing permutations and codification of her role during early Phoenician settlement. I then contextualize Astarte’s worship at Motya within a wider network of the goddess’s maritime cult. By locating Astarte’s coastal shrines together with those of her Greek correlate, Aphrodite—while also considering the semantic overlap and potential entanglement of Astarte Aglaia and Aphrodite Euploia—this paper establishes the maritime function of Astarte as shepherd and beacon for seafaring Phoenicians. By examining both cults and their corollary functions, this paper illuminates the dynamic relationship between Phoenician religious performance and seafaring practices, including navigation and trade network creation. Further, the holistic reconstruction of ritual practice presented in this paper lends itself to broader discussions of religious performance in the ancient Mediterranean diaspora.

  AIA-3E