Baal Hammon

Summary

Baal Hammon was the greatest god of Carthage, the Phoenician city on the African coast, and its people paired him with Tanit in their vows. His name came from northern Syria: its earliest occurrence is in a Phoenician inscription of King Kilamuwa at Zincirli, ancient Samʾal, of the ninth or eighth century BCE. The Phoenicians then worshipped him at Carthage and the other Punic cities of North Africa, Malta, Sicily and Sardinia; the Greeks called him Kronos, and the Romans in Africa took him over as Saturn. Niehr, "Baal Hammon," Iconography of Deities and Demons; Camps, "Ammon," §1.

Baal Hammon has no written story among the stories of the gods; he has two accounts. The first is the stones set up by the people of Carthage. The dedicator writes on the stone that he vowed it "to the Lady Tanit, Face of Baal, and to the Lord Baal Hammon", sometimes adds the reason, "because they heard his voice", and then writes his name and his descent back to his grandfather. These monuments show Baal Hammon as a bearded old man in a tall conical cap, seated on a throne or on a winged sphinx, one hand raised in blessing and the other holding a sceptre that usually ends in an ear of grain, and in many images an incense stand rises before him.

The second account comes from the Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily. When Agathocles, tyrant of Syracuse, landed his army near Carthage in 310 BCE, its people took their defeats for the anger of Kronos, because in former times they had offered him their noblest sons, but had lately been buying children, rearing them and sending them in their place. So they chose two hundred of the noblest children and sacrificed them publicly, and three hundred others who were under suspicion offered themselves of their own accord. The city had a bronze image of Kronos with its hands stretched out, palms up and sloping toward the ground, so that a child laid on them rolled down and fell into a pit full of fire. Diodorus adds that the old Greek story of Kronos doing away with his own children seems to have been kept in mind among the Carthaginians through this custom.

The idea his worship turns on is the aged father who is asked and who receives. The dedicator asks, is answered and gives thanks with a stone that outlasts him; in Diodorus's account the city in danger gives him what it holds most dear. Between the two accounts stands the tophet of Carthage, where urns holding the burnt remains of infants and animals were found beneath the votive stones, and scholars disagree about them: one group holds that most of the infants died at or before birth and were buried there, another that their ages point to sacrifice. In the Roman period Baal Hammon became African Saturn, lord of the land and giver of its fruits, and Tanit became his consort Caelestis, "the heavenly one"; at the sanctuary of Thinissut the two old names and the two new ones meet.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The Phoenicians write it without vowels, bʿl ḥmn. The first word is baʿl, in Arabic the owner and master of a thing and a woman's husband, and in the vows "the Lord". The second is ḥ-m-n, which the Amazigh Semitic-reading essay reads from ḥamma, to heat, so that Hammon is "the hot one". In Lane, ḥamma al-māʾa is to heat water with fire, ḥamma at-tannūr to fire an oven and fill it with fuel, and ḥamīm is hot water, the fiercest heat of summer, and also the live coals with which one fumigates. In Hebrew, ḥammān, plural ḥammānîm, is an incense altar or sun pillar, which the Brown–Driver–Briggs lexicon derives from ḥammâ, the sun, from the same root. On this reading Baal Hammon is "the lord of the heat", master of the hot brazier, which is what his images show: an old man seated with an incense stand before him; and it fits what Diodorus says of the fire into which what was offered to him fell.

Linguistic Root

The ḥ of ḥ-m-n is ḥ in both Phoenician and Arabic, and m is m, so the comparison matches letter for letter between two branches of one house. The final n is a suffix, as in Hebrew ḥammān from ḥ-m-m. Three things meet on this root: heat in Arabic, the altar on which incense is burned in Hebrew, and the incense stand that rises before Baal Hammon in his images. The scholar Barnett had already read the name "lord of the burning altar" and made its bearer a sun god, which Xella rejected.

Niehr gives another reading that many scholars hold: "Lord of the Amanus", the mountain in northern Syria near Zincirli where the name first appears, so that Hammon is a place name rather than a quality, and "Baal Hammon" a title that replaced an older proper name. This reading explains where the name first appears; the heat reading explains the sense of the root and the incense stand in the images; the choice between them is not settled. The Amazigh Semitic-reading essay offers a third: that Hammon is Egyptian and Libyan Ammon, making Baal Hammon "lord of Ammon". This is weaker, because Phoenician writes the name with ḥ, while Ammon begins with a vowel and has no ḥ. The link between the two is one of images, not of names: in Le Glay's view Baal Hammon took the ram's horns from Ammon, though Camps counts few horned images of him.

Key Mythic Narratives

From Syria to Carthage and to Palmyra

Niehr writes that Baal Hammon is not originally a Phoenician god but a local god of northern Syria, received into the pantheon of Tyre in the sixth century BCE and worshipped afterwards at Carthage and in the western cities; his cult then returned east between the first century BCE and the second century CE, when he had a temple at Palmyra on Jebel Muntar. Among his images in the west are a stela from El-Hofra near Constantine dedicated to him, and a terracotta statue of him enthroned found in the sanctuary at Thinissut, dedicated to Baal-Saturn and Tanit-Caelestis.

African Saturn

In Roman Africa the cult of Saturn was found everywhere, so that Camps calls him truly the master of that land, worshipped in two aspects, giver of fruits and master of time; Camps says that Saturn undoubtedly succeeded Baal Hammon. Le Glay holds that in the Roman period Saturn and Caelestis grew so close that they shared titles, both "holy", "eternal" and "lord", and their cults lasted into late antiquity.

Symbolic Reading

The Amazigh Semitic-reading essay makes Baal Hammon "the father god" and "the greatest god of Carthage", sees in his pairing with Tanit the model of Anat and El in Canaan, and finds in his name the fusion of a Semitic god with an Amazigh one. The monuments show the fatherhood in the image of the seated old man, and the land in the ear of grain that tops his sceptre, a tie to the crops that lived on in Saturn, giver of fruits, after him.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Diodorus himself linked the custom of Carthage with the story of Kronos, who swallowed his children for fear for his kingship in Hesiod's account. The difference is that Kronos takes his children to keep his throne, while the city in Diodorus's account gives its children to save itself. Roman Saturn, Kronos's counterpart, inherited Baal Hammon's place in Africa. In neighbouring Libya, horned Ammon was the father of Gurzil, and a neo-Punic inscription names Gurzil before Saturn. Ugaritic Baal shares only the title: the Baal of Ugarit is the young rain god who fights the sea and death, while Baal Hammon is a seated old man who receives vows.