The Carthaginian Hannibal swore to his compact with Philip king of Macedonia before "the rivers, meadows, and waters," and the Zeus Demarus of Philo must be explained as Baal Tamar, _i.e._ Baal in the procreative power. Northward of Sidon there falls into the sea a river especially sacred to Baal Tamar, which the Greeks called Tamyras (now Nahr Damur). It marks, no doubt, the spot where the act in the myth was localised, which, as Philo observes, was still pointed out. Pliny tells us that with the Belus, _i.e._ Baal (Sihor Libnath of the Hebrews), a mountain stream falling into the sea southward of Sidon, after a brief, and in the plain, a sluggish course from the parent lake, customs of a very sacred nature were connected.[504] The goddess whom the Syrians invoked, beside the sun-god, had various names. According to the fragments of Philo, El had handed over the government of the city of Byblus to Baaltis, _i.e._ to Bilit, the "mistress." At Ascalon she was known as Derceto, at Hierapolis (Bambyke, Membidsh) as Atargatis;[505] the Hebrews call her Ashera. Herodotus calls the goddess of Ascalon Aphrodite Urania; he also denotes her as the goddess of the sexual impulse and of procreation, and mentions the temple at Ascalon, as the oldest temple of this goddess which he knew; "from this comes the shrine of Urania in Cyprus, as the Cyprians themselves said; and the Phenicians, who also belonged to Syria, founded the temple of Urania on Cythera." Pausanias observes that the Assyrians had been the first among men to worship Urania, and after the Assyrians came the Paphians in Cyprus, and the Phenicians at Ascalon.[506] Hence we may conclude that Baaltis, in nature or in name, was not far removed from the Bilit or Mylitta of the Babylonians, and this conclusion is sufficiently confirmed by all that we know of the worship of Baaltis. Cinyras, the first king of Byblus, is said to have erected shrines to Aphrodite at Byblus and in Cyprus, and his daughters are said to have paid service to the goddess with their persons. The maidens of Byblus waited for strangers in the market-places, just as the maidens of Babylon waited in the temple (p. 269), and the price of compliance was paid, as in Babylon, to Aphrodite.[507] Of the maidens of Cyprus we are told that they went down to the sea shore in order to sell themselves to the sailors on landing.[508] We also find that sacred servants, male and female, who dedicated themselves to this form of worship, were always to be found in the temples of the Syrian goddess, and even married women entered their ranks at certain times.[509] The Hebrews tell us that the women wove tents for Ashera, and that paramours, male and female, were in her sanctuaries.[510] In shady groves, on green hills, and among the mountain forests of Libanus, sacrifice was offered to this goddess. The lofty trees, the terebinth, the evergreen pine and the cypress were sacred to her; the pomegranate, the symbol of fruitfulness, was her