Astarte

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Of the five wandering lights the ancient sky-watchers tracked against the fixed stars, one is bright enough to throw a shadow and to be seen by day. It rises before the sun and sets after it, the last light of evening and the first of morning, and to the peoples of the Levantine coast that brilliance was a goddess. They called her ʿAštart. The Greeks wrote the name Astarte; the Babylonians, watching the same planet, called her Ishtar; and the scribes of Judah, who hated her, wrote it Ashtoreth and meant a curse. She was the lady of desire and of the battle-line, of the cities of the Phoenician shore and the colonies their ships founded across the sea — and the planet the later astronomers would name for the Roman goddess of love was hers first, under another tongue.

The name and the star

In the Northwest Semitic of the Bronze Age coast the goddess is ʿAṯtart, attested in the tablets of Ugarit, the city whose archives, baked in the destruction of around 1185 BCE, preserve the oldest clear record of the Canaanite gods. The same three consonants run down the centuries and across the dialects: Ugaritic ʿṯtrt, Phoenician ʿštrt, Hebrew ʿaštōret, and — in the cuneiform east, where the divine type is older still — Akkadian Ištar, the goddess the Sumerians had known as Inanna. To say these are one goddess would erase the distance between Uruk and Sidon; to say they are unrelated would ignore the shared grammar of love-and-war and the shared star. They are kin, not one. This entry keeps to the western branch — the goddess of the coast, her own cities and her own stone.

The star is the planet the Romans would call Venus, and the link between the goddess and that light is old and wide: across the Near East the brightest wanderer belonged to the love-and-war goddess, read as Ishtar’s in Babylon and as Astarte’s on the coast. The duality of the planet — its appearance as both the morning star that leads the dawn and the evening star that follows the sun — was felt to answer the doubleness of the goddess herself, the warrior who rises armed at daybreak and the lady of desire who hangs over the night. How deeply astral the Ugaritic ʿAṯtartu was is itself debated: some scholars read her star-character as a later and largely Mesopotamian overlay, faint or absent in the earliest western evidence. The planet and the goddess belong together by the first millennium; how far back the bond runs is a question the tablets do not settle.

What the western evidence makes plain is the pairing of love and war. The two domains that a modern eye holds apart the ancient Near East saw as one province of a single passionate and dangerous power. Astarte is the goddess who governs both the drawing of bodies together and the breaking of them on the field, and the Egyptians, who took her into their own pantheon during the New Kingdom, received her precisely as a warrior — a goddess on horseback, armed, daughter of the sun-god, set among the fierce deities of battle. The lover and the war-leader are not two goddesses awkwardly joined but one will seen from two sides.

Bronze statuette of Astarte from Byblos (Roman workshop, 2nd century CE), the goddess standing nude on a podium beneath a dove headdress. British Museum. Photo via Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain Mark 1.0.

At Ugarit and in the Baal Cycle

In the mythological poems of Ugarit, ʿAṯtartu is not yet the towering city-lady of the later coast. She appears more often in the cult lists and the god-catalogs than in the narrative epics, and where she acts she stands in the shadow of a fiercer sister: the dominant warrior-goddess of the Ugaritic mythology is Anat, with the mother-goddess Asherah above them both as consort of the patriarch El. In the six tablets of the Baal Cycle — the great poem of the storm-king’s combats with Sea and with Death — ʿAṯtartu is paired with Anat at the storm-god’s side: when Baal would strike down the messengers of Yamm, the Sea, it is the two goddesses together who seize his hands and restrain him, and it is she who helps him hold his kingship. (For the cycle and its pantheon, see the wider Ugaritic and West Semitic religion.)

The scribes give her a striking epithet: ʿṯtrt šm bʿl, read as “Astarte name of Baal” or “Astarte of the face of Baal” — a power that carries the storm-god’s own authority, his name made a goddess at his side. The title is not a Bronze Age curiosity. It survives the collapse of Ugarit and reappears, eight centuries later, cut into the coffin of a Sidonian king. What Ugarit preserves is the goddess in an earlier register: armed, paired, named in the lists, her violence already inseparable from the fertility she guards, and her bond to the storm-god already fixed in a phrase that would outlast the city that coined it.

The great lady of the Phoenician cities

In the first millennium ʿAštart rose to the front rank of the coastal cults, and nowhere more than at Sidon, which named her its city goddess. The royal sarcophagi of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE make the bond explicit and personal. The basalt coffin of King Eshmunazar II — found at Sidon in 1855, now in the Louvre, and among the longest Phoenician inscriptions known — records a dynasty bound to the goddess through its women and its building. The king’s mother, the queen Amoashtart, whose name itself means “my mother is Astarte,” served as the goddess’s priestess; the royal house, the text says, built her temples in Sidon and at a sanctuary it names with the title ʿštrt šm bʿl — the very “Astarte name of Baal” the Ugaritic scribes had used. The shorter coffin of King Tabnit, Eshmunazar’s father, names him a priest of Astarte. A king served at her altar; his queen held her priesthood; their son was buried under her title. This is not the lurid orientalism of later outsiders but the ordinary furniture of a civic cult — vows, priesthoods, temple-building, a dynasty’s devotion cut in stone.

At Tyre she stood beside the city-god Melqart; at Byblos, the most ancient of the coastal sanctuaries, the great goddess long worshipped as the Lady of Byblos was identified with her. And when the Phoenicians sailed west and planted their colonies, they carried her with them. At Carthage she was worshipped alongside the goddess Tanit — the dominant “face of Baal” of the Punic west — the two goddesses overlapping without quite merging, and Astarte’s name surfacing again and again as an element in Carthaginian personal names. Her signature traveled with her cult: the lion and the dove, the sphinx and the horse, and the eight-pointed star within a circle that marked the planet the watchers of the sky called hers.

She must be held distinct from the goddesses she most resembles, for the sources themselves let them blur. Anat is the war-fury of the Baal Cycle, wading in blood to the knees; Asherah is the mother of the gods, the consort of El; Astarte is the lady of love and the star. The three overlap in domain, share epithets, and are sometimes conflated by the very texts that name them — the fluidity is real, and modern scholarship marks it rather than resolving it. What separates Astarte is the breadth of her civic reach and the persistence of her star: she is the goddess a king served and a queen’s priesthood honored across the whole Phoenician world, from the home cities to the far Punic shore.

Ashtoreth: the name turned to shame

To the writers of the Hebrew scriptures she was a rival, and they handled her name as a weapon. The form Ashtoreth in the Masoretic text is, most scholars hold, a deliberate distortion — the three consonants of ʿaštart fitted with the vowels of the Hebrew bōšet, “shame,” so that to speak the goddess’s name was to pronounce a verdict on her. The plural “Ashtaroth” became a shorthand for foreign goddesses as a class, much as “the Baalim” stood for foreign gods, the singular figure dissolved into the mass of the rejected.

The narrative books name her at the height of the monarchy. The books of Kings report that Solomon, in his old age, turned after “Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians” and built her a high place east of Jerusalem (1 Kings 11); generations later the reforming king Josiah, in his purge of the foreign cults, defiled that very shrine (2 Kings 23). The books of Samuel set the armor of the fallen Saul in a temple of Ashtaroth. And in the book of Jeremiah the prophet rages against the worship of the “Queen of Heaven,” to whom the families of Judah pour libations and bake cakes: the children gather wood, the fathers kindle the fire, the women knead the dough and shape the cakes for the goddess (Jeremiah 7:18), and when Jeremiah condemns them the women answer that they will not stop, for when they burned incense to the Queen of Heaven they had bread enough and prospered (Jeremiah 44). The cakes were kawwānîm, a word borrowed from the Akkadian kamānu — the offering itself carries an eastern loan. Whether the Queen of Heaven of Jeremiah is Astarte, the Mesopotamian Ishtar, or a blended figure of the two has been argued without settlement; the title fits more than one goddess, and the contest is part of what the polemic preserves.

Read from inside the Yahwist frame, this is the denunciation of an abomination tolerated too long. Read for what it documents, it is the long internal struggle within Israelite religion over whom, and how many, to worship — a struggle in which ʿAštart was no foreign curiosity but a near and persistent option, attested by the very heat spent against her. The energy of the rejection is the measure of how large she once stood within the world the reformers were leaving, not how small.

Aphrodite of the Phoenicians

When Greeks and Phoenicians met in the trading ports, the Greeks recognized in Astarte their own goddess of desire, and the equation they drew ran the other way from what a later age might expect: they held that Aphrodite herself had come to them from the East. Herodotus, surveying the temples of the goddess he calls Aphrodite Urania — Aphrodite of the heavens — names the sanctuary at Ascalon on the Syrian coast as the oldest of all her temples, and reports that the famous shrine on Cyprus was founded from it, and the shrine on the island of Cythera by Phoenicians from that same Syrian land (Histories 1.105). The traveler Pausanias, centuries later, gives the same descent in order: the first to worship the Heavenly Aphrodite were the Assyrians, after them the Paphians of Cyprus and the Phoenicians of Ascalon, and from the Phoenicians the people of Cythera learned her cult. The two most storied Greek homes of Aphrodite — Paphos on Cyprus, where she was said to have risen from the sea, and Cythera, from which she took the name Cytherea — carried, the Greeks themselves said, a Phoenician root.

Terracotta figure of Astarte-Isis, Egypt, 1st century BCE–1st century CE — the goddess absorbed into the syncretic religious world of the late Mediterranean. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (M.82.77.16), public domain.

Such identifications were the ordinary grammar of ancient religion, in which a foreign deity was understood through a local one without any claim that the two were a single being. They were taken seriously, and they marked a true point of contact: the armed, star-bound goddess of the coast and the Greek goddess of desire genuinely shared the province of love, and Aphrodite kept, in her epithet Areia and her armed images at Sparta and Cythera, a martial cast that fits the eastern goddess better than the laughter-loving Aphrodite of Homer. But the equation flattens what it translates. The Aphrodite the Greeks knew was not the weapon-bearing civic goddess whom a Sidonian king served as priest. The Romans, meeting the Punic goddess, linked her in turn with Juno and with Venus; the bilingual gold tablets from the Etruscan sanctuary at Pyrgi, dedicated around 500 BCE by the lord of Caere, set the Phoenician ʿAštart beside the Etruscan Uni — the goddess the Romans called Juno — a syncretism cut into gold a thousand miles from Sidon.

The Pyrgi Tablets (c. 500 BCE): gold plates in Etruscan and Phoenician recording a dedication to Astarte, equated with the Etruscan Uni. Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, Rome. Photo: Sailko, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The two Astartes

A separate question shadows the goddess’s reception: the lurid rites that classical writers fastened to her temples. The reports of ritual prostitution and orgiastic cult descend from Herodotus on Babylon and reappear in Lucian’s second-century account of the Syrian goddess at Hierapolis — a text written in deliberate archaizing Greek, in the manner of Herodotus, and not a sober field witness. The whole category of “sacred prostitution” in the ancient Near East has been challenged at the root: the practice is asserted far more often by hostile outsiders than attested in the sanctuaries themselves, and the modern dismantling of the construct, most fully in the work of Stephanie Budin, treats it as a literary creation rather than a documented cult. What the inscriptions record is priests and priestesses, temple-building kings, and vows — not the spectacle the outsiders supplied.

So there have always been two Astartes, and the gap between them is the heart of her afterlife. One is the goddess the stones attest: the lady of a particular coast, armed, civic, sea-girt, whose temple a Sidonian king built and whose priesthood his mother held, who carried the storm-god’s own title and rose with the evening star over a few harbor cities and the sea-lanes their ships kept. The other is the goddess the Western imagination assembled out of her — the type of the oriental love-goddess, the dangerous and sensuous queen of the East, folded together with Ishtar and Isis and the Anatolian Cybele into a single archetypal Great Goddess addressed by a heap of borrowed names. That second Astarte runs through the Romantic and occult literature of the modern age — John Singer Sargent gave her a brooding, jeweled, slow-marching figure in his murals for the Boston Public Library — and she is a real and living construction. But she is the imagination’s goddess, not the epigrapher’s.

John Singer Sargent, study of Astarte (c. 1890–95), for the Boston Public Library murals — the goddess remade as the type of the oriental love-deity. Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0.

The two never fully separate, because each draws on the same brilliance overhead. The planet that leads the dawn and trails the dusk was the first thing about her the watchers of the coast named divine, and it is the last thing that survives intact: long after the Sidonian temples fell and the coffin of a king who served her was carried off to a Paris museum, the morning and evening star still rises and sets where her worshippers saw a goddess cross the sky. The Romans gave the planet the name of Venus, and Venus they took from Aphrodite, and Aphrodite — the Greeks insisted — they had taken from the Phoenician coast. The name on the planet is a translation three times over of the goddess who hung there first.

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