Bound Adonis, the Tammuz of old Assyria, there had played for long ages a more tender devotion. For the Syrians his name meant "the Lord" (=the Adonai of the Hebrew Bible); and over the tale of his untimely slaughter by the boar on Mount Lebanon the Eastern women had yearly wept for a hundred generations. The "women weeping for Tammuz" in the temple of Jerusalem before the exile were his worshippers; and in the Athens of the days of the Peloponnesian war he received the same litany of mourning. For his sacred city of Byblos he was as it were the soul and symbol of the yearly course of Nature; the annual reddening of the Adonis river by the spring floods being for his devotees a mystery of his shed blood. Then came the ritual of grief, in which his wooden and painted effigy, lying with that of Aphroditê, the Goddess who loved him, took the place of the victim in the older rite in which he too was doubtless slain "for the people." The "gardens of Adonis," shallow trays in which various green plants grew quickly and as quickly died, had been originally charms to hasten the fertility of the spring, like the sacrifice itself; but long custom made them mere symbols of untimely death, and the cult was one of pathos and compassion, passing in the usual way to exultation and gaiety when, after his effigies had been thrown as corpses into the sea or the springs, the God rose from the dead on the third day, and in the presence of his worshippers, by some mummery of make-believe or mechanical device, was represented as ascending to heaven. As in the cult of Attis, it was women who "found" the risen Lord, whose death they had mourned.