Iberian Religion
IBERIAN RELIGION. The term Iberian religion is used here geographically. It refers to the religious systems of Iberia, the name the Greeks gave in antiquity to the Iberian Peninsula, from the arrival of the Phoenicians (documented by the ninth century BCE) to the time these places were incorporated into the Roman Empire in the first centuries CE.
Tartessos is the name that identifies the peninsula in the first historical records dating to ancient Greek literature. That is the time of the expansion of Eastern cultural influence on other parts of the Mediterranean (from the eighth to sixth centuries BCE). Tartessian culture had its core in lower Andalusia and seems to have developed from the cultural contact between the indigenous late Bronze Age population and Semitic colonizers who arrived from the eastern Mediterranean. Later, a secondary Greek presence contributed to the culture.
Tartessos and Religious Contact with the Phoenician World
Phoenician materials appear in several shrines, most importantly in Gadir (Cádiz), the site of the famous temple of Melqart, patron god of Tyre, assimilated to Herakles and described by such authors of the Roman Empire as Strabo (Geographica 3.5), Silius Italicus (Punica 3.1–44), and Philostratus (Vita Apollonii 5.5).
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