At Ugarit, cuneiform tablets attest multiple Canaanite goddesses, among them three are considered as relevant to theories about the origin of Atargatis: John Day asserts that all three shared many traits with each other and may have been worshipped in conjunction or separately during 1500 years of cultural history.

[a] Atargatis, wearing a mural crown, is the ancestor the royal house, the founder of social and religious life, the goddess of generation and fertility (hence the prevalence of phallic emblems), and the inventor of useful appliances.

[c] The goddess was posed seated with two lions on her sides,[d] "In one hand she had a scepter, in the other a spindle, and on her head she wears rays, a tower [mural crown]..", and she wore a girdle (Ancient Greek: κεστός) as well.

[35] The tetradrachm issued under Demetrius III Eucaerus (96–87 BCE, coin image above) shows a fish-bodied figure on the reverse side, which scholarship identifies as Stargateis.

[36][e] The cult statues of Stargateis and her consort Hadad were commonly employed on as the motif on the reverse of tetradrachm coinage by this monarch and by Antiochus XII Dionysus (87– 84 BCE) who succeeded him.

[38] And some of the Hieropolitan coinage portray "Atargatis as indeed seated between lions and holds a scepter in her right hand and probably a spindle in her left", just as Lucian had described.

[48] In the 1930s, numerous Nabatean bas-relief busts of Atargatis were identified by Nelson Glueck at Khirbet et-Tannûr, Jordan, in temple ruins of the early first century CE;[49] there the lightly veiled goddess's lips and eyes had once been painted red, and a pair of fish confronted one another above her head.

This seemed a gratuitous ("incredible") excision to the analyst, given that Venus's birth from an ocean-found egg was not a far cry from the familiar version of the Aphrodite/Venus's genesis out of water (sea-foam).

[55][57] Ovid in Fasti recounts the legend that the goddess Dione accompanied by Cupid/Eros plunged into the river in Palestine (Euphrates), whereby a pair of fish came to convey them through water to aid her escape from Typhon.

[59] Menander and others[j] also relate this legend,[60] and some of the versions, say that the goddess and Cupid subsequently transformed into fish, possibly preserving the original telling.

[61] The second myth describes the birth of Syrian Venus as originating in an egg that fell into the Euphrates, rolled onto land by fish, was hatched in the clutches of doves (scholia to Germanicus's Aratus;[62] Hyginus, Fabulae).

In one aspect she typifies the protection of water in producing life; in another, the universal of other-earth;[66] in a third (influenced, no doubt, by Chaldean astrology), the power of Destiny.

[72] Glueck noted in his 1937 paper that "to this day there is a sacred fish-pond swarming with untouchable fish at Qubbet el-Baeddwī, a dervish monastery three kilometres east of Tripolis, Lebanon.

Lucian[76][77] and Apuleius gave descriptions of the beggar-priests who went round the great cities with an image of the goddess on an ass and collected money.

The wide extension of the cult is attributable largely to Syrian merchants; thus we find traces of it in the great seaport towns; at Delos especially numerous inscriptions have been found bearing witness to her importance.

Again we find the cult in Sicily, introduced, no doubt, by slaves and mercenary troops, who carried it even to the farthest northern limits of the Roman Empire.

[21] The leader of the rebel slaves in the First Servile War, a Syrian named Eunus, claimed to receive visions of Atargatis, whom he identified with the Demeter of Enna.

The priests were described as effeminate, wearing heavy makeup, turbans on their heads, and dressed in saffron colored robes of silk and linen; some in white tunics painted with purple stripes.

They shouted and danced wildly to the music of flutes, whirling around with necks bent so that their long hair flew out; and in an ecstatic frenzy they would bite their own flesh and cut their arms with knives until they bled.

[79] According to a story retold by Lucian, the Assyrian queen Stratonice saw in a vision that she must build a temple at Hieropolis to the goddess and so the king sent her there with a young man named Combabus to execute the task.

Another story ascribed to Combabus mentions that a certain foreign woman who had joined a sacred assembly, beholding a human form of extreme beauty and dressed in man's attire, became violently enamoured of him: after discovering that he was a eunuch, she committed suicide.