Sandon (god)
Sandon (sometimes spelled Sandes, Sandan or Sanda) was a god in ancient Tarsus, visually represented as a mitre-wearing human form carrying a sword, a flower or (commonly) an axe who stands on the back of a horned and winged lion.[1][2] Associated primarily with war and weather,[3] Sandon was the chief god in the Cilician pantheon from at least the beginning of the second millennium BC.[4] The ancient Greeks and Romans equated Sandon with Herakles.[5] A large monument to Sandon existed at Tarsus at least until the third century AD.
References
- ^ Donald A. MacKenzie, Myths of Babylonia and Assyria (1915), p. 348.
- ^ James George Frazer, Adonis Attis Osiris: Studies in the History of Oriental Religion (1906), p. 127.
- ^ Martin Hengel and Anna Maria Schwemer, Paul between Damascus and Antioch: The Missing Years (SCM Press, 1997), p. 167.
- ^ Hetty Goldman, “The Sandon Monument of Tarsus”, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 60, No. 4 (December 1940), p. 544.
- ^ Goldman, p. 544.