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>In early modern scholarship, a cult to a supposed Heliopolitan Triad of Jupiter Heliopolitanus, Venus Heliopolitana, and Mercury (or Dionysus) was thought to have originated in ancient Canaanite religion, adopted and adapted firstly by the Greeks, and then by the Romans when they colonized the city of Heliopolis (modern Baalbeck) in the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon. The Canaanite god Baʿal (Hadad) was equated with Jupiter Heliopolitanus as sun-god, Astarte or Atargatis with Venus as his wife, and Adon, the god of spring, with either Mercury or Dionysus as third member of the triad, son of Heliopolitan Venus and Heliopolitan Jupiter.[34] Scholarly reexamination of the archaeological and iconographic evidence suggests that the notion of a Heliopolitan Triad is a modern scholarly artefact, deriving from Roman perceptions of functional similarities between their own and local deities, the naming of local deities after Roman ones, and Roman deities after local ones, sometimes on very slender grounds.[35] There is, however, no archaeological, epigraphic or iconographic evidence for any stable, familial or functionally effective triple grouping within the native Heliopolitan or Canaanite pantheons, and none for the clear equivalence of leading Roman and Heliopolitan deities either prior to the likely Roman occupation during Rome's civil wars, in Julius Caesar's time at the earliest, or its promoti