Astarte

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Two appetites that should pull a worshipper in opposite directions sit together in one goddess: the force that draws bodies into the bed and the force that breaks them on the field. Astarte holds both. She is the principal goddess of the Phoenician and wider West Semitic world — a power of desire, of fertility, and of war, worshipped from the harbor cities of the Levantine coast to the Punic colonies of the western Mediterranean. Her name in Northwest Semitic is ʿAštart; the Greeks wrote it Astarte, and the biblical scribes recorded her as Ashtoreth. She belongs to the same divine type as Mesopotamian Ishtar and the Sumerian Inanna behind her: the goddess in whom love and violence are not reconciled but held in a single hand, so that the bristling of her weapons and the brilliance of her star are two faces of the same will.

The type is older than the name attached to it here. In the cuneiform south, the goddess of the bed and the battle-line is Inanna-Ishtar, lady of Uruk, who goes down through the seven gates and comes back; on the Levantine coast the same shape of power wears the name ʿAštart and a different history. To call them the same goddess would flatten that history; to call them unrelated would ignore the shared grammar of desire-and-war and the shared evening star. They are kin, not one — and the entry below keeps Astarte to her own coast, her own cities, and her own stones.

The earliest clear voice: Ugarit

The first place she speaks plainly is the Bronze Age city on the Syrian coast whose archives, recovered from the clay of the late second millennium BCE, name ʿAṯtartu among the gods of the Canaanite (Canaan) pantheon. There she is the lesser-attested of a pair: the dominant goddess in the mythological texts is the warrior Anat, with the mother-goddess Asherah above them both, while ʿAṯtartu appears more often in the cult lists and the god-catalogs than in the narrative poems. Where she does act in the great Baal Cycle — the six-tablet epic of the storm-king’s combats with Sea and with Death — she stands beside Anat as the storm-god’s ally, restraining him from striking the messengers of Yamm and helping him to hold his kingship. The Ugaritic scribes attach to her the epithet ʿṯtrt šm bʿl, read as “Astarte name of Baal” or “Astarte of the face of Baal”: she is a power that carries the storm-god’s authority, paired with him as a hunting, armed goddess. (For the cycle and its world, see the wider Ugaritic and West Semitic religion.)

What Ugarit gives, then, is not yet the towering city-goddess of the later coast but the same goddess in an earlier register: armed, paired with a fiercer warrior-sister, named in the lists, her violence already inseparable from the fertility she guards. The destruction of Ugarit around 1185 BCE in the Late Bronze collapse did not end her. The West Semitic world that survived the collapse — the Iron Age cities of the Phoenician coast — carried her forward and raised her higher.

The Phoenician ascent: Sidon, Tyre, Byblos, Carthage

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. The inscription of King Tabnit and the longer inscription of his son Eshmunazar II — the latter a basalt sarcophagus now in the Louvre, found at Sidon in 1855 and among the longest Phoenician texts known — record a dynasty bound to the goddess through its women and its building. Eshmunazar’s father had been her priest; Eshmunazar’s mother, the queen Amoashtart — a name that itself means “my mother is Astarte” — served as priestess of ʿAštart, and the text tells how the royal house built temples for the goddess in Sidon, in the place it calls “Sidon of the Sea,” and at a sanctuary the inscription names with the title ʿštrt šm bʿl, the same “Astarte name of Baal” that the Ugaritic scribes had used eight centuries earlier. A title coined in the Bronze Age cult survives, cut into a king’s coffin in the Iron Age city.

Her cult did not stop at Sidon. At Tyre she stood beside the city-god Melqart; at Byblos the great goddess long called the Lady of Byblos, the Baalat Gebal, was identified with her, mistress of the city’s most ancient sanctuary. 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 merging. The cult precincts that mark her presence — the temple and its enclosure, the sacred grove — and the evening star she was tied to give her a recognizable signature across the coast and the sea. Her symbols travel with her: the lion, the dove, the sphinx, the horse, and the eight-pointed star within a circle that is the planet the watchers of the sky called hers. The star that the Babylonians read as Ishtar’s, the Phoenicians read as Astarte’s; the brightest of the wandering lights moved under the goddess of love from one people to the next.

The lurid rites that later classical writers fastened to her temples — temple prostitution above all — belong to that travel as hostile freight, not as documented cult. The reports 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 and not always a sober witness; the whole tradition of “sacred prostitution” in the ancient Near East has been challenged at the root by modern scholarship, which finds the practice asserted far more often by outsiders than attested in the sanctuaries themselves. What the inscriptions record is priests and priestesses, temple-building kings, and vows — the ordinary furniture of a civic cult — not the spectacle the outsiders supplied.

Ashtoreth: the name made a verdict

To the writers of the Hebrew Bible she was a rival, and they handled her name as a weapon. The form Ashtoreth that appears in the Masoretic vocalization is widely understood to be a deliberate distortion: the three consonants of ʿAštart fitted with the vowels of bōšet, “shame,” so that to pronounce the goddess’s name was to pronounce a verdict on her. The plural “Ashtaroth” became a shorthand for foreign goddesses in general, much as the masculine “Baalim” stood for foreign gods — the singular figure dissolved into a class of the rejected.

The narrative books name her at the highest level of the monarchy. The books of Kings report that Solomon, in his old age, went after “Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians,” building a high place for her east of Jerusalem (1 Kings 11), and that the reforming king Josiah, generations later, defiled exactly that shrine in his purge of foreign cult (2 Kings 23). The books of Samuel set the armor of the fallen Saul in the temple of Ashtaroth, and the prophetic and Deuteronomistic voices return to her worship again and again as the standing temptation. The “Queen of Heaven” whom the women of Judah honor with poured libations and baked cakes in the book of Jeremiah may be this same goddess, though the title has also been claimed for the Mesopotamian Ishtar or another Canaanite figure; the contest is itself part of what the polemic preserves.

Read from inside the Yahwist frame, this is 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 not a foreign curiosity but a near and persistent option, attested by the very energy spent against her. The polemic that demonizes her stands parallel to the polemic that turned Baal into a prince of demons: the more central the rejected god to the world the reformers were leaving, the more sustained the rejection. Her place among the gods that the biblical writers gather under Elohim and set against the one God of the Hebrew scriptures is a measure of how large she once stood, not how small.

Translated into other tongues: the interpretatio

When Greeks and Phoenicians met in the trading ports, Astarte was regularly identified with Aphrodite — the equation Philo of Byblos states flatly in his late account of Phoenician religion, that the Phoenicians say Astarte is Aphrodite. At times she was matched instead to Hera for her civic sovereignty, or to Selene for her tie to the night sky and the star. The Romans, meeting the Punic goddess, linked her with Juno and with Venus; the bilingual gold tablets from the Etruscan sanctuary at Pyrgi, dedicated around 500 BCE by the ruler of Caere, set the Phoenician ʿAštart beside the Etruscan Uni, the goddess the Romans knew as Juno — a syncretism cut into gold a thousand miles from Sidon.

Such equations 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 one being. They are real points of contact, taken seriously by the people who made them, and they are not nothing: the armed, star-bound goddess of the coast and the Greek goddess of desire genuinely shared the province of love. But they flatten what they translate. The Aphrodite the Greeks knew was not the weapon-bearing, civic, sea-girt goddess whom a Sidonian king served as priest; the resemblance is a meeting of cults, the act of speakers reaching for the nearest word in their own tongue, not proof of one goddess standing behind many masks.

Research and reception

The modern study of Astarte has had to assemble her from scattered evidence — Ugaritic ritual texts, Phoenician royal inscriptions, classical testimonia, and iconography from across the Mediterranean — because, unlike Mesopotamian Ishtar, she left no descent-poem or hymn-cycle of her own. The foundational modern collection is Corinne Bonnet’s Astarté: Dossier documentaire et perspectives historiques (Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 1996), which gathers the written, epigraphic, and iconographic testimonia city by city, from Byblos to the Iberian peninsula; the work is surveyed in Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge’s review essay in Kernos (2002), and Bonnet has deposited related work in the HAL open archive. For the goddess’s place in the religion of ancient Israel and the convergence of Canaanite goddesses into the polemical record, the standard treatment is Mark S. Smith’s The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002).

Two strands of older testimony require a critical headnote rather than credulous repetition. The classical reports of orgiastic and prostitutional rite — most fully Lucian’s On the Syrian Goddess, available in the public-domain edition and translation of Herbert A. Strong and John Garstang (sacred-texts.com) — are literary performances in the manner of Herodotus, not field reports, and the entire category of ancient “sacred prostitution” has been dismantled by Stephanie Budin’s The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2008), reviewed in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, which argues that the practice is largely a construction of hostile and derivative sources. The biblical “Queen of Heaven” and the goddess’s polemical shadow are treated in the Bible Odyssey survey The Queen of Heaven, which weighs the candidates — Astarte, Ishtar, and others — without collapsing them.

In the later esoteric and occult literature this caution is abandoned altogether. Astarte is folded into a single archetypal “great goddess,” gathered with Isis, Ishtar, and the Anatolian Cybele as interchangeable faces of one feminine principle. The classic modern statement is the Wiccan Charge of the Goddess, assembled in the mid-twentieth century by Doreen Valiente out of the litany of Isis-names in Apuleius, the writings of Aleister Crowley, and Charles Leland’s folklore, in which the Great Mother declares she was of old called among men Isis, Astarte, and by many other names. That synthesis is a real and living religious construction — but it belongs to the modern imagination, not to the ancient evidence, which shows distinct goddesses with distinct cities, titles, and histories standing behind the shared shape.

There is a distance, then, between the two Astartes. One is the goddess the later imagination assembles: the universal queen behind every veil, addressed by a heap of borrowed names. The other is the goddess the stones attest — narrower, sharper, local. She is the one whose temple a Sidonian king built and whose priesthood his mother held, the armed mistress of a particular coast 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 names the Greeks, the Romans, the Etruscans, and the modern occultists laid on her are translations of her; the coffin of Eshmunazar, cut with her title in her own tongue, is the goddess herself. She answered to all the borrowed names because her worshippers had already cut the true one in stone.

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