Iuppiter Dolichenus is of interest as one of the group of oriental deities whose worship gained so wide a footing in the Roman world under the Empire. Second only in popularity to the Persian Mithras, Dolichenus extended his sway to the farthest limits of the Empire, and in some outlying provinces like Britain seems even to have challenged the primacy of Mithras himself.

Doliche, the original seat of Iuppiter Dolichenus, was a small town in the iron-bearing district of Commagene (ubi ferrum nascitur) in northern Syria, the meeting-place of several ancient military and trading routes. The earliest portrayals of the Dolichene god, dating from the mid-second and early first millennia B.C., identify him as in origin a Hittite thunder-god, with mixed Khurrite and Semitic attributes. He is shown as a bearded figure, with a pigtail, standing on a bull (symbolical of thunder and fertility), facing right, wearing a peaked and horned bonnet, fringed tunic, girdle, and sword, and brandishing a double axe in his right hand and a triple thunderbolt in his left; in the field above his head is the winged disk of the sun. The Hittite name of the god was Teshub, but by the later fully Semiticized Syrians he was identified with the Semitic god Hadad as the Ba'al (i.e. ‘Lord’) of the town of Doliche. In pre-Roman times, under the influence of Chaldean cosmology, there was a tendency to extend his supremacy to the heavens generally (‘Ba'alshamin’), and this extended status is reflected in later Roman dedications in the use of such epithets as aeternus, conservator totius mundi, exsuperantissimus, and the like.