Nehalennia

Nehalennia (spelled variously) is a goddess of unclear origin, perhaps Germanic or Celtic, Nehalennia is attested on and depicted upon numerous votive altars discovered around what is now the province of Zeeland, the Netherlands, where the Rhine River flowed into the North Sea. Worship of Nehalennia dates back at least to the 2nd century BC, and veneration of the goddess flourished in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD.

Nehalennia is attested on 28 inscriptions discovered in the Dutch town of Domburg on the Zeeland coast, when a storm eroded dunes in 1645, disclosing remains of a temple devoted to the previously unattested goddess Nehalennia. A similar number were discovered in 1971-72 in the town of Colijnsplaat, and two others have been found in the Cologne-Deutz area of what is now Cologne, Germany.

Dutch archeologist J.E. Bogaers and Belgian linguist Maurits Gysseling, in their joint publication Over de naam van de godin Nehalennia ("On the name of the goddess Nehalennia"), listed several different forms of the name that appear in inscriptions. While Nehalennia is by far the most common spelling, Nehalenia and Nehalaennia both appear a few times. Gysseling characterizes these two forms as Latinisations of the more archaic Nehalennia. Several sporadic spellings that are attested once each were rejected by Bogaers as non-standard or misread due to the poor state of some of the inscriptions.

The Domburg inscriptions to Nehalennia inspired Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn to produce a hasty etymology linking the name Nehalennia to an ancient Scythian, with which he attempted, with the linguistic tools then available, to bridge the already-known connections between European languages and modern Persian.

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