Jebel Aqra has a long history as a
sacred mountain. The
Hurrians called it and considered it the home of
their storm god Teshub. The
Hittites continued his worship, celebrating Teshub's victory over the sea in the
Song of Kumarbi found in their capital
Hattusa. They also celebrated the mountain in its own right, naming it as a divine
guarantor on their
treaties and observing rites in its honor. The ancient port of
Ugarit (modern
Ras Shamra) lies to its south. Texts discovered there in the 1920s, including the
Baal Cycle, showed its residents considered the peak of to house the
lapis and
silver palace of their storm god
Baʿal () and his sister
ʿAnat. Baʿal is now often identified with
Hadad and his variations understood as local cults. The form
Baʿal Zephon was worshipped widely: his temple at Ugarit held a
sandstone relief dedicated to him by a royal scribe in
Egypt and the
king of
Tyre called on him as a divine witness on a treaty with the
emperor of
Assyria in 677 BCE. It appears in the
Hebrew Scriptures as (
Tsāfōn). In
ancient Canaanite religion, Mount Sapan was sometimes accounted as the home of all the gods, not only
Baʿal and
his sister. As Mount Zaphon, it appears in that role in the
Hebrew Scriptures'
Book of Isaiah, along with the
Mount of the Congregation. From its importance and its position at the northern end of
Canaan, it also became a
metonym and then the word for the direction "
north" in the
Hebrew language. Under
various forms, worship continued through
antiquity, when it was called (,
Kasios; ; ,
Gassios Ler) and lay north of
Posideium (modern
Ras al-Bassit). Even closer, the earliest Hellenic foothold in the
Levant lies at the beach on its northern flank at
Al Mina. Here
Euboeans and
Cypriotes experienced some of their earliest on-site experience of northwest Semitic cultures, from the early eighth century BCE onwards. "The Hittite name persisted in
neo-Hittite culture into the ninth century [BCE] and so when Greeks settled on the north side of Mount Hazzi they continued to call its main peak 'Mount Kasios'", Lane Fox points out, observing that it was the
Mount Olympus of the Near East. The cult of the god of the mountain was transferred, by
interpretatio graeca, to
Zeus Kasios, the "Zeus of Mount Kasios", similar to
Ras Kouroun in the Sinai. Tiles from the Greco-Roman sanctuary at the site, stamped with the god's name, were reused in the Christian monastery that came to occupy the eastern, landward slopes of Kazios. When kings and emperors climbed Mount Kasios to sacrifice at its
peak sanctuary, it was a notable cultural occasion.
Seleucus I Nicator sought there the advice of
Zeus in locating his foundation, a Seleuceia (one of many) on the coast. Coins struck there as late as the first century BCE still show the city's emblem, the
thunderbolt, sometimes placed upon the cushion of a throne. In the winter of 114/15 CE
Trajan was spared in a major earthquake that struck
Antioch; commemorative coins were struck featuring the
shrine of Zeus Kasios, with its pointed roof on pillars, and a representation of its rounded sacred stone, or
betyl. Trajan's adoptive son
Hadrian accompanied him; he returned in 130 AD to scale the mountain at night, no doubt, Lane Fox remarks, to witness the rising of the sun, visible for several minutes from the peak, while the land below lay still in darkness; it was said later that a thunderbolt at the peak struck the animal he was about to sacrifice. In spring 363 the last pagan emperor,
Julian, scaled the mountain, where he had an
epiphanic vision of Zeus Kasios, according to his friend and correspondent
Libanius. Greek
theophoric names
Kassiodora and
Kassiodorus, equally a "gift of Kasios", recall a vow of one or both parents made to ensure fertile conception. Christian hermits were drawn to the mountain; Barlaam challenged its
demons by founding a monastery near the treeline on its eastern slopes, and
Simeon Stylites the Younger stood for forty years on a pillar near its northern flanks until his death in 592. The cult site is represented by a huge mound of ashes and debris, wide and deep, of which only the first have been excavated. Archaeologists only reached as far as the
Hellenistic strata before the site was closed, as it lies in a Turkish military zone on its border with Syria. The remains are presumed to have been destroyed following the construction of a Turkish military base on the summit in 2012. ==Notes==