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| Jupiter Ammon |
Ammon: name of a Libyan immortal and his oracle in an oasis in Egypt's western desert. It became famous after Alexander the Great made a detour to consult the god. The contemporary figure of the
oasis is Siwa.
The god Ammon, who is ordinarily shown with the horns of a ram, was initially feared by Libyan defect tribes only. He may have been related to Ba'al Hammon, a god of the Semitic hoi polloi (e.g., the Phoenicians and Carthaginians). However, this is just a hypothesis, based on the law of similarity of the names only, and we can not be really certain about the stock of this cult - as is almost always the instance when we talk about an aspect of ancient religious belief.
The cult was taken over by the Egyptians, who named the god with their superb
god Amun; they called god of the oracle "Amun of Siwa, lord of great counsel". The first pharaoh said to have given to this god was Bocchoris (r.718-712), but the report, which was composed in the second century CE by the Roman author Tacitus, is gone and belongs to a rather alleged text; as a moment, we can not be certain that it is true. note It is quoted here.
Another substance was the Macedonian town Aphythis,
Macedonian A satellite picture of the oracle in Siwa can be got here. prince Alexander must have seen the When he had Siwa. corresponding to Arrian of Nicomedia, Alexander did this because he favorite to imitate his identified antecedents Perseus and Heracles. This is an left couple: Perseus never did a role in Alexander's propaganda. Yet, since the 5th century, Perseus was reputed the ascendent of the Achaemenids, the Persian royal house; and everybody known that the Macedonian kings settled from Heracles. Pursuing in the footsteps of Heracles and Perseus was thus, in a sense, a religious searching to the conquering of the Achaemenid empire.
It is manageable that Alexander had already started to revere Ammon, because during the sack of the Greek town of Thebes, he ordered that the house of Pindar had to be spared. On the other hand, there is no prove that Alexander worshiped the ram-god before he seen Siwa.
However this may be, the result was important: Alexander was recognise as Ammon's son, and started to trust that he was a demi-god indeed. affiliated to an confessedly hostile source, Ephippus of Olynthus, Alexander sometimes worn the horns of his powerful father Ammon on public affairs. We can not got the truth of this story, but it is certain that straightaway after his death, he was described in this fashion.
In the Zoroastrian tradition, Alexander was taken to be an associate of the evil spirit, the lasting touch of the Persian supreme god Ahuramazda. Ever since, the devil is described with ram's legs and horns.
Another noted visitor was the Carthaginian large Hannibal, who taken the oracle that he given be immersed at Libyssa, which Hannibal knew as a town in Africa. However, it released out that there was a town in Bithynia with the same name, and this was indeed Hannibal's burying place, as the historian Appian of Alexandria spells in his History of the Syrian wars.
In the Roman years, the oracle was not really overlooked, but there were not many visitors. Yet, the god, now identified as Jupiter-Hammon, was still super standard. The emperor Augustus old images of the god in the forum he gave to Mars the Avenger in Rome, and the soldiers of the Third legion Cyrenaica were particularly fond of Ammon.
The cult had now spread as far as the river Rhine, far away from the god's Egyptian home of birth. This can be exemplified by the proud bust of Ammon, which was observed at Lechenich near Bonn in Germany.
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