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Kingship and sovereignty

This page groups deities by the domain or function myth assigns them, the area of life, craft or natural force a god is called on to govern. Wikipedia's overview of deities gives a clear example in the Yoruba god Ogun, described as "the primordial masculine deity as well as the archdivinity and guardian of occupations such as tools making and use, metal working, hunting, war, protection and ascertaining equity and justice." Browsing by domain lets a visitor find every god of, for example, war or the harvest, across many different pantheons at once.

Facts

Overview

What Defines This Grouping

The gods of the Northwest Semitic city-states of the Late Bronze and Iron Age Levant. Canaanite is a modern cover term for a religious world known very unevenly across many polities, and almost all the narrative material comes from a single site, Ugarit. Its weight in scholarship lies partly in its close relation to the religious background of the Hebrew Bible. 2

Peoples and Traditions Covered

The Phoenician, Punic and wider Levantine city-states, known chiefly from inscriptions and from the reports of their neighbours 2

Peoples and Traditions Covered

Ugarit, the Late Bronze Age city of the Syrian coast, from which nearly all the narrative texts come 3

Attestation

Era of Attestation

The Ugaritic tablets of about 1400 to 1200 BCE carry the narrative texts, and the same deities are named in Phoenician and Punic inscriptions into the Roman period. 3

Veneration Today

No continuous cult survives; the tradition is known from its texts, inscriptions and archaeology. 2