Phoenician Deities

The gods of the Phoenician city-states of the Levantine homeland, above all Tyre and Sidon, worshipped from the Bronze Age through the Hellenistic period. Each major city held its own patron god, such as Sidon's healing god Eshmun, identified by Greek writers with Asclepius and worshipped at a major sanctuary near the city, and Tyre's tutelary god Melqart, whose name is generally read as King of the City. A city's cult traveled with its traders and colonists to the settlements it founded around the Mediterranean, most famously Melqart's cult reaching Tyre's colony at Gadir, modern Cadiz.