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As for the second category, the use of Herodotean explanatory frameworks, the aniconic thrones of the sun and moon are an excellent example (§34). From extant examples of empty thrones in Phoenician cult centers it is practically certain what these objects were. What we cannot be certain of is Lucian’s attribution of the thrones to the sun and moon and of their aniconism to the visibility of the luminaries in the heavens. He is obviously echoing Herodotus’s Persian ethnography, where the Persians are made to articulate a criticism of traditional Greek practice (also à propos of anthropomorphic deities) which in fact arose in intellectual circles among the Greeks themselves (Hdt. 1.131; Lightfoot 2003: 449–455). Much the same applies to the criticism of Greek practice in the following chapter, on the bearded statue of Apollo (§35). What is at stake here is not satire. Lucian is not having fun at anyone’s expense. But he has imported a stance and mode of explanation from Ionian ethnography into an entirely different context, Roman Syria over half a millennium later, leaving us just as far as ever from what (if anything) the Hierapolitans really thought.