Although it was partially rebuilt by Julian the Apostate, little survives of the ancient buildings, except some Roman ruins.
Adonis's Semitic name or epithet naʿmān, "the beautiful" or "the lovely one," was preserved by Isaiah 17:10 and by Greek authors, especially when comparing the anemone to Adonis. Naʿmān or Naaman is a West Semitic proper name, attested from the second millennium BCE onward, and the epithet occurs frequently in literary texts from Ugarit. It implies that Adonis was conceived as a youth of remarkable beauty. Instead, he lacks any feature that would characterize him as a deity of the netherworld, except his secondary assimilation to Osiris, the king of the dead, in the Alexandrian ritual.
Myths
Several mythical stories are related to Adonis. According to the myth that Apollodorus cites from Panyassis of Halicarnassus, active in the early fifth century BCE, Adonis was the son of the Assyrian/Syrian king Theias by his daughter Smyrna, who by deceiving him as to her identity, conceived Adonis by him. When Theias discovered the truth he would have slain his daughter, but the gods in pity changed her into a myrrh tree.
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