Astarte- Canaanite GodDeity"Queen of Heaven"

Name of Baal

In the Ugaritic tablets, Astarte belonged to the divine family of El and Asherah. She bore the title "Name of Baal," the storm god's companion in love and war. When the sea god Yam sent messengers to El's court demanding sovereignty and Baal as tribute, Astarte stood among those who refused. Baal fought Yam and broke him. Astarte proclaimed the victory, declaring that the sea god was driven from his throne.

An Egyptian retelling of this myth, the Astarte Papyrus, placed her at the center of the confrontation. She was dispatched to face Yam directly, bargaining with the insatiable sea on behalf of the assembled gods.

A fragmentary Ugaritic text, KTU 1.92, preserves a different image: Astarte hunting on horseback, bow in hand, galloping across open country. No other goddess in the Ugaritic corpus rides.

Astarte on Horseback

Astarte's martial reputation carried her into Egypt during the New Kingdom. Ramesses II claimed her as his shield-bearing companion in battle alongside Anat, and Egyptian stelae depict her mounted and armed, riding into war beside the pharaoh. At Memphis she was venerated alongside Ptah and Sekhmet. The Winchester College relief shows a nude goddess standing upon a galloping horse, erotic and lethal in the same image.

The River of Byblos

At Byblos, Astarte's worship became inseparable from the cult of a dying god. His name was Adonis, from the Semitic adon, "lord." The myth told of a beautiful youth beloved by the goddess, killed by a wild boar in the mountains of Lebanon. Each spring the Nahr Ibrahim, the river that bore his name, ran red with iron-rich sediment from the hills. The people of Byblos said it was Adonis's blood flowing to the sea.

Women led the annual mourning. They wept for the dying god and planted "gardens of Adonis," shallow beds of lettuce and fennel that sprouted fast and withered within days. Then came the reversal. Lucian described the festival in detail: on the day the mourning ended, the people declared Adonis alive and living in the upper air.

Queen of the Phoenicians

As Phoenician ships spread across the Mediterranean from the early first millennium BCE, Astarte's temples rose wherever they made port. At Sidon, her great temple stood at the heart of the city. The sarcophagus inscription of King Eshmunazar II names him "priest of Astarte" and invokes the goddess's protection over his people. At Tyre she was honored alongside Melqart as patron of the metropolis.

Her cult traveled with the colonists. At Kition on Cyprus, archaeologists have excavated her temple precinct. At Carthage she merged with local traditions and became closely associated with Tanit. Sidonian coins from the fifth century BCE show Astarte enthroned in her temple or standing on the prow of a war galley, the crescent and star flanking her figure.

The Shame of Ashtoreth

In the Hebrew Bible she appears as Ashtoreth, a name deliberately distorted using the vowels of boshet, "shame." King Solomon built shrines to "Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians" on the hills east of Jerusalem, and the biblical historians blamed his foreign wives and foreign gods for splitting the kingdom in two. The prophet Samuel demanded that Israel "put away the Ashtaroth" as the price of deliverance.

When the Philistines killed King Saul on Mount Gilboa, they stripped his armor and hung it in a temple of Ashtaroth as a victory offering to the goddess.