Baalat Gebal
She was the main goddess in the local pantheon of Byblos, and a temple dedicated to her, which remained in use from the third millennium BCE to the Roman period, was located in the center of this city.
She is mentioned in a number of literary texts, including the so-called Letter of Hori, the writings of Philo of Byblos, and Lucian's De Dea Syria.
[13] She has been variously identified as a local form of Asherah, argued to be an appropriate tutelary goddess for a port city due to being addressed as “lady of the sea” in Ugarit, Anat (as suggested by Edward Lipiński) and especially commonly Astarte.
[3] Frank Moore Cross argued that Baalat Gebal might have been identical with Qudshu, who he identifies as an alternate name of Asherah (Elat) according to him used in Ugarit and Egypt.
[15] Izak Cornelius also considers her to be a separate deity,[16] and rejects an association between Baalat Gebal and Asherah, noting that a link to Astarte is more plausible.
[22] It has been pointed out that most of the explicit evidence for the identification of Baalat Gebal and other deities is limited to Egyptian and Greek sources, which makes it possible that such texts constitute an example of interpretatio graeca and analogous phenomena.
[19] Frances Pinnock has suggested that the vagueness of her name might have resulted in foreign rulers from Egypt, and possibly also Ebla and elsewhere, being able to identify her as an aspect of their own deities.
[25] This association finds parallels in instances of linking the same Egyptian goddess to various other distant areas, including Sinai, Punt, Wadi el-Hudi and Gebel el-Asr.
[29] Depictions of Baalat Gebal from the Achaemenid period show similarity to images of “Hathor-Isis” from Egypt, which might indicate she was specifically identified with the syncretic form of these two goddesses.
[46] It is commonly assumed that they were produced locally,[47] though it has also been proposed that they were imported from Egypt roughly between 2050 and 1800 BCE due to stylistic parallels with similar objects from Mentuhotep II’s tomb located at Deir el-Bahri.
[52] Furthermore, in a single case Rib-Addi presented Baalat Gebal as one of the deities the pharaoh owed his position to, which similarly is not otherwise attested for rulers of Levantine polities.
[55] It is not known how the letters were received, though Marwan Kilani speculates that the frequent references to Baalat Gebal presumably would not be perceived positively by Rib-Addi’s contemporary Akhenaton due to his religious policies.
[56] No direct references to this pharaoh’s attitude towards the goddess are known, but during his reign Byblos was not recognized in Egyptian sources as a religious center of particular importance, and played no role in what Kilani deems “Atonist ideology”.
[58] Apparently she attempted to play a role in the city’s foreign relations, which finds no parallel in the cases of any other religious personnel mentioned in the Amarna letters.
[60] Marwan Kilani notes that in contrast with sources from Egypt and Mesopotamia, references to female clergy are rare in texts from Bronze Age West Semitic speaking areas, and suggests that the fact that Byblos’ tutelary deity was a goddess rather than a god might be the reason behind Ummaḫnu’s relative prominence.
[37] An Old Kingdom relief with an Egyptian inscription referring to a monarch whose name is not preserved as the “beloved of Hathor, Lady of Byblos” has been identified during excavations of the temple of Baalat Gebal.
[70] The pharaoh himself mentions her in on a stela from the temple of Amun in Jebel Barkal in Nubia, which commemorates the construction of ships for a military campaign in the north from wood from the “neighborhood of the Lady of Byblos.”[71] A reference to her might also be present in a damaged text found in the Theban tomb of one of his officials, Senneferi, which describes an expedition to Byblos.
[72] Andrés Diego Espinel notes that the Egyptian acts of devotion to Baalat Gebal might have been one of the means to secure favorable political and economic relations with local rulers, as Byblos was a major center of trade and a source of wood, oil, wine and lapis lazuli imported to Egypt.
[74] A reference to Baalat Gebal has been identified in the satirical Egyptian text known as Letter of Hori, possibly originally composed during the reign of Ramesses II, in which the eponymous figure discusses her cult center: “I will tell you of another mysterious city.
And their goddess, what is she like?”[77] According to Marwan Kilani, is not certain if describing Byblos as “mysterious” (or alternatively: “hidden”) is an allusion to an unknown mystical or religious event, or a sarcastic figure of speech meant to highlight that the average scribe should be familiar with the city.
[85] Ouranos sends her and her two sisters, Astarte and Rhea, to trick and defeat their brother Kronos, but the latter instead marries them, and they subsequently give birth to his children.
