reproduction, on which depended the very existence of an agricultural and stock-raising community in a land of limited and uncertain rainfall. This is generally true of all ancient Semitic religions. Its main features were mourning for the death of the vegetation deity Baal, rites to enable him to overcome his adversary (the god of death) and thereby to ensure enough rain to produce a new crop, and rejoicing at his resurrection and marriage to the fertility goddess Ishtar.
Associated with the idea of the periodic dying of the vegetation in the summer heat and its revival in spring, was that of the renewed vigour of the sun after its apparent defeat in winter, as embodied in the early Tammuz myth. This deity was called Adonis by the Greeks and afterwards was identified with the Egyptian Osiris. Rites in his honour included sacred prostitution, later commuted to the symbolic shearing off of women's hair, and self-castration, later reduced to circumcision, an ancient Semitic practice which was eventually abandoned by Syrians adopting Christianity. The paternal sky god and maternal earth goddess, with all lesser and localized deities, were honoured with sacrifices, with 'high places' (altars and sacred stones on hilltops), with temples, stone pillars and sacred poles or trees, with magical household images and with other symbols and rites repeatedly denounced by the Hebrew prophets.
Throughout the Amorite and Canaanite period relations between Egypt and Syria remained close. Byblus and other Syrian ports had sent cedar, wine and oils to Egypt even before the Semites had arrived, and had received in exchange gold, metalwork and papyrus. Gradually peaceful commerce led to military invasion as early as the twenty-third century and before 1600 B.C. southern and central Syria as far as Damascus and the Biqa were included in the Egyptian empire, then under Hyksos domination.
The Hyksos were a confused goulash of humanity which included Semitic Amorites and Canaanites as well as non-Semitic Hurrians and Hittites. Equipped with curving iron
