Manat

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The road that ran north from Mecca toward the oasis of Yathrib kept the sea on its left hand for a long stretch, and at a place called Qudayd it passed close under a hill. There, on the open shore where the Red Sea works its tides against the sand, a stone was set up, and the people who came down the road did not pass it without stopping. They shaved their heads at her foot. They stood a while before her in silence. A pilgrimage that did not end there did not count as ended at all. The stone had a name, and the name was Manat — older than the road, older than the two goddesses who would later be set beside her, the eldest of the three and the gravest, because her portion was the portion no one declines.

The eldest of the three

Her name is a measure. The Arabic root behind it carries the sense of meting out, of dealing a thing in shares, and the noun maniya — plural manaya — means a death, an allotted death, the fate that falls to a particular life at its particular hour. To speak of Manat was to speak of the apportioned lot: the span set to a person, the term written against a name, the doom that arrives on its day and not before. She is the goddess of that measure. Where another power might be asked for rain or for victory, she presided over the one thing asked of no one and given to all, and her domain was time itself insofar as time runs out.

That the name and the word for fated death share a root is not a modern guess. The vocabulary of doom in the old poetry — al-manaya, the fates that strike; al-manun, the fatal one, time as the thing that wears every life away — sits within the same cluster of meaning, so that the goddess and the abstraction of death-by-allotment were never far apart in the language (Wikipedia, Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry). When a poet of the age spoke of the manaya that come for a man, the word stood close to her shadow. The later tradition would note, with some unease, that this whole family of fate-words is largely absent from the Qur’an, and would connect that silence to the words’ association with her — the doom that was hers to apportion left, by preference, unnamed.

She is reckoned the oldest of the three. In the company of Allat, the Goddess whose very name is the feminine of the word for god, and al-Uzza, the Mightiest and the morning star of the Quraysh, Manat is set first in age. The judgment rests in part on the names people carried: theophoric names built on hers — a man called Abd Manat, “servant of Manat,” or Zayd Manat — are attested early, earlier than the comparable names formed on the other two, and on that ground she is taken to be the most ancient of the company, very possibly among the oldest powers of the Semitic world (Wikipedia, Manat). Antiquity here is not a guess at a date but a reading of evidence: the people who carried her name into their own had carried it for a long time.

Within the older world she was, with the other two, counted a daughter of the high god, a great power standing near the source of authority and mediating toward it — one of the three to whom the Arabs of the Hijaz turned. The three were not a single cult with a single shrine. Each had her own seat and her own people, and Manat’s were the tribes of the northern oasis and her seat was the stone on the southern road.

The portion at Qudayd

Her sanctuary stood at Qudayd, on the Red Sea coast between Mecca and the oasis that the new faith would call Medina, at a spot named al-Mushallal. The image was a great stone — an aniconic block, a worked or unworked mass that received devotion as the goddess present, in the manner of the Arabian shrines, where the divine met the worshiper in stone rather than in carved likeness. To it came offerings and sacrifices, and around it ran the rites of those who held her in honor.

The fullest description of the place comes from a book written long after the place was gone. Hisham ibn al-Kalbi, who worked in the eighth and ninth centuries of the new era, gathered the old cults into a single volume, the Kitab al-Asnam, the Book of Idols, and it is from him above all that the later world knows the shape of Manat’s worship. “The most ancient of all these idols was Manat,” his account runs; she was set up on the seashore in the vicinity of al-Mushallal at Qudayd, between Medina and Mecca, and all the Arabs venerated her and sacrificed before her and brought their gifts. This is the load-bearing source for nearly everything that can be said of her cult, and its distance must be kept in view. Ibn al-Kalbi wrote generations after the shrine had fallen, in a world that had already turned away from the goddesses; he is a careful and indispensable witness, but a late one, external to the living cult, and the picture he preserves is a recollection set down across a gulf of time and of changed allegiance.

What he and the tradition after him record is a devotion concentrated among particular tribes. The Aws and the Khazraj — the two great Arab tribes of Yathrib, the oasis north of Mecca — were among the most fervent of Manat’s people. They were her tribes as al-Uzza was the goddess of the Quraysh of Mecca; the bond was local and intense. The pilgrimage rite preserved for her is precise in its small way: those who made the round of the holy places would not regard the pilgrimage complete until they had come to al-Mushallal, shaved their heads at the foot of her stone, and stood before her. The closing of the pilgrim’s labor was owed to her. The same gesture that marked the end of the sacred journey — the shaving, the standing still — was given into the keeping of the goddess of endings.

There is a fitness in this that the tradition felt without always naming. The power who apportioned the term of a life received the rite that closed the term of a pilgrimage; the goddess of the appointed end stood at the end of the road. The offerings owed her were the offerings owed to fate, and a people who knew that the manaya came for everyone brought their gifts to the one who measured them out.

The tribal coloring of her cult is worth weighing. Where al-Uzza belonged to the Quraysh of Mecca and drew her honor from the city at the center of the Hijaz, Manat’s strongest devotion lay to the north, in the oasis of Yathrib, among the Aws and the Khazraj — a people whose later quarrels and later reconciliation would shape the history of the place that became Medina. The goddess of the lot was theirs in a particular way, and their attachment to her stone at al-Mushallal was such that the tradition makes their devotion the measure of hers: among all the Arabs, these were her people. That a goddess so old and so widely acknowledged should be held most fiercely by the tribes of a single oasis is the ordinary shape of Arabian religion, where the great powers were shared across the peninsula yet each had her local house and her local kin.

The record of all this is thin and late, and it would be a falsification to thicken it — the cult of Manat survives in a handful of sentences and a scatter of names, not in temple inscriptions or in her own preserved words. No image of her is described in detail; no hymn to her is kept; the rites beyond the head-shaving and the standing are not set down. What can be said is said plainly: a stone on a shore, a measured-out portion, the tribes of an oasis who would not finish their pilgrimage without her.

The same goddess in the north

Manat of Qudayd is not the only Manat. Far to the north, in the kingdom that the Aramaic-writing caravan traders built out of Petra and the carved-tomb city of Hegra, a goddess of the same name and the same domain stood among the powers of the Nabataeans. They called her Manawat, or Manotu — the fate, the apportioner — and under the long pressure of Greek and Roman contact she was sometimes set beside Nemesis, the dealer of deserts, the goddess who measures what is owed (Wikipedia, Nabataean religion). That the northern Manawat and the Hijazi Manat are one goddess, carried under one name across the breadth of Arabia, is the scholarly reading, and it gives her a reach that the late Hijazi sources alone would not suggest.

In the north she speaks, after a fashion, in stone — and she speaks at the threshold of the grave. The Nabataean tombs cut into the cliffs at Hegra carry inscriptions above their doors, and a number of them call her by name. The formula is a curse laid upon the violator: the dead are sealed under the anger of the gods, and any who would sell the tomb, or pledge it, or open it to bury a stranger, or draw up a document to claim it, is given over to the wrath of Dushara, the great god of the Nabataeans, and of Manotu beside him. The goddess of the apportioned lot is set to guard the apportioned grave. Her name, invoked at the door of the tomb, threatens the trespasser with a fate — and a fate is precisely what she has to give.

This northern attestation matters for the kind of evidence it is. The Hijazi cult of Manat is known almost entirely through later memory; the Nabataean Manawat is named in inscriptions carved in her own time, at a known place, in a known hand, dated by the script to the centuries on either side of the turn of the era. The two together — the late recollection of the south and the contemporary stone of the north — frame the same goddess from two distances, and the closer of the two distances is the one that watches over the dead. The carved necropolis at Hegra, where these curse-inscriptions stand, was the first site in Saudi Arabia entered on the UNESCO World Heritage list, inscribed in 2008 (UNESCO, Hegra Archaeological Site). The goddess who once guarded its tombs is now read off their walls by the people who come to study them.

Qasr al-Farid, the largest of the carved tombs at Hegra (Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ), first century CE. On tomb doorways across this necropolis the Nabataeans set curse-inscriptions invoking Manotu — the northern Manat — against any who would violate the grave. Richard Mortel, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

The naming and the end

The cult of Manat closed within a single lifetime, and the manner of its closing was set down by the tradition that succeeded it. When the new faith came to the Hijaz, the three goddesses were named together in its scripture — Allat, and al-Uzza, and Manat the third, the other — in the verses of the fifty-third sura (Wikipedia, Manat). The naming is the hinge on which the old order turned to the new. It is sober in the text and is best left sober here: one sacred dispensation gives way to another, and the goddesses who had stood for ages are named at the moment of their setting-aside. The later Muslim memory would fold a great deal of difficulty into these few verses, and would treat the three as the daughters claimed for the high god and then disclaimed; the passage and its weight can be set down here without entering the controversy that grew around it. What the record shows is a transition rendered from the far side, by those for whom the goddesses had become the past.

The stone at Qudayd was taken down in the wake of that change. The tradition records that in the year that answers to 630 of the new era, after Mecca had come over to the new faith, a small mounted party was sent against al-Mushallal — Sa’d ibn Zayd al-Ashhali with a score of horsemen — to destroy the image of Manat, in the same season that the other shrines of the three were thrown down (Wikipedia, Manat). This too comes through the later sources, Ibn al-Kalbi among them, and carries their distance and their interest; it is the account the succeeding tradition kept of how the old worship ended, not a notice from within the cult. The shore lost its stone, the pilgrims’ road lost its halt, and the rite that had closed the pilgrimage was closed itself.

But the sense she carried did not go down with the stone. The poetry of the age, much of it gathered and preserved precisely by the men who recorded the old religion, kept the language of fate alive: the manaya that come for every life, the manun that wears the generations away — the doom of allotment spoken in the very words that stood close to her name. A culture that had imagined the term of life as a portion measured out did not stop imagining it so because the shrine was gone; the figure of fate as an apportioner, the death assigned to each as his share, outlasted the worship by a long way, surviving in the cadence of the verses where every man’s manaya waits for him on its day. The fate-vocabulary’s near-absence from the new scripture, set against its saturation of the old poetry, marks the seam between the two worlds as cleanly as the felling of the stone.

So she stands at the end, as she stood at the end of every road that touched her: the eldest of the three, the gravest, the one whose gift was the gift refused by no one. Allat was the great Goddess and al-Uzza the morning star, and Hubal kept the arrows of decision in the sanctuary of Mecca; but Manat kept the portion, the measured share of days, the appointed end. Her stone is gone and her name survives — in the curse above a Nabataean grave, in the roll of fate-words in the old verse, in the memory of a shore where the pilgrims would not call their journey finished until they had stood, heads shaved, before the goddess of the lot that runs out.

→ Related: Allat · Al Uzza · Hubal · The Nabataeans · The Sabaeans · The Minaeans · Hegra · Petra · Tayma · Marib · Qaryat Al Faw · Kaaba · Nabataean Kingdom · Kingdom Of Saba · Himyar · Divination · Idolatry · Revelation · Anat · Astarte Goddess · El God · Ishtar