Jupiter Dolichenus was a Roman god whose mystery cult was widespread in the Roman Empire from the early-2nd to mid-3rd centuries AD. Like several other figures of the mystery cults, Jupiter Dolichenus was one of the so-called 'oriental' gods; that is Roman re-inventions of ostensibly foreign figures in order to give their cults legitimacy and to distinguish them from the cults of the traditional Roman gods. assumed to have really been a Roman continuation of an oriental figure. In the case of Jupiter Dolichenus, the cult's exoticism was attributed to an interpretatio romana derivation from a semitic Hadad-Baal-Teshub cult, which had its cult center on a hill (37°07′40″N 37°20′43″E / 37.12778°N 37.34528°E) near Doliche, 30 Roman Miles west of Samosata on the Euphrates, in the Commagene in eastern Asia Minor.
Like the other mystery cults (including the other pseudo-oriental ones), the cult of Jupiter Dolichenus gained popularity in the Roman Empire as a complement of the open 'public' religion of mainstream Roman society. Unlike the Roman public cults, but like the other mysteries, the temples of the cult of Jupiter Dolichenus were nominally closed to outsiders and followers had to undergo rites of initiation before they could be accepted as devotees. As a result, very little is known about the cult's beliefs and practices from the few clues that can be obtained from the sparse iconographic, archaeological or epigraphic evidence.
