“Myth is integral to religion, therefore; it is not a fancy wrapping paper which must be taken off in order to get down to the realities of cult. Yet the role of Greek myths, it need scarcely be stressed, is very different from that of sacred books. At the most drastic, intellectuals felt able to dismiss the whole mythic representation of deity as what came to be called theologia fabularis, “mythical theology,” an invention of poets, while still treating the cults as a valid mode of access to the divine. For them the myths were indeed just a wrapping, and a very deceptive one. The only alternative to rejection, for the philosophically trained, was allegorical reinterpretation. But even for those outside those very restricted circles there was little about the myths that was stable or dependable, or so at least it appears to an outside observer. Stories about the birth of deities, we have seen, were fundamental, the staple of cult hymns. But the poet of the early Homeric Hymn to Dionysus already contrasts what he declares to be his own true account of the god’s birth with no fewer than five “lying” counterclaims. That was one way to navigate the currents of endless variants without being swept into skepticism: one account is true, all others false. To a large extent the variants are regional, and we can suppose that worshippers accepted the version of the myth that they were born to; the claim that Apollo was born in Lycia will not often have been heard on Delos. Similarly, though we may be aware that the myths associated with a particular sanctuary change over time, we should not necessarily project that awareness onto those who frequented it. But it is very uncertain to what extent we can postulate mythological consensus, an agreed local version, even at a particular place and time. Since priests did not recount myths, there was no obvious mechanism by which even a powerful cult could communicate a standardized account from the center. Temple sculpture, where it existed, could scarcely alone carry such narrative weight. In some cults, as we have seen, foundational myths were repeated again and again by pious choruses. If the same hymn was rendered on all occasions year in, year out, its version could indeed establish itself as standard. But at great sites such as Delphi and Delos, frequented by sacred missions from afar, different choruses sang different hymns. Stability is likely to have been the exception rather than the rule.
Myths lacked fixed form; nor was there anything resembling a canon of myths known to everybody even if in divergent forms. Two consequences follow from the absence of a canon. On the one hand, the question of what myths were known to whom is always an open one. One can guess at a core of “archmyths” that were very generally familiar, because often alluded to or depicted. But that criterion can produce surprising results. At Greek sacrifices, mortals received the best meat, and the gods had to be content with fat and bones. Hesiod explained that the unequal division had its origin in a deception exercised by Prometheus “at the time when the gods and mortal men had a dispute” (or “were separated “at Mekone” (Theogony 535–36). Hesiod’s myth relates the practice, satisfyingly, to a time of interaction and perhaps of division between gods and mortals, a time therefore when the order of the universe is being constituted; he also links it to Prometheus, the central figure in other myths that concern dealings between mortals en masse and gods. But though allusions to the unequal division are quite common, no other source of the classical period appears to relate it to Prometheus or Mekone or a dispute/division between gods and men. Are we then entitled to say that “the Greeks” explained the division of meat at sacrifice by reference to the trick of Prometheus? The core of myths universally or all-but-universally known may be very small. But if the core is small, the periphery is uncontrollably large. Any story about gods and heroes that any Greek heard or saw and remembered on any occasion was a part of their conception of the gods. Many Greeks from very early on rejected many stories about the gods as untrue, because unworthy of divine dignity or morality, and they were free to do so; but there was no mechanism whereby stories of “gods in sundry shapes, committing heady riots, incest, rapes” could be put under a ban as uncanonical. Since there was no canon, it was equally possible for moralists to reject such stories, and for unreclaimed man to revel in them.”
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There is something about Medusa that just brings out the stupid in most people because why did I just see someone claim the Library of Pseudo-Apollodoros as unreliable and corrupted by big bad Ovid because in it Athena has a personal conflict with Medusa that has nothing to do with Perseus, which apparently cannot possibly be part of ✨original✨ Greek mythology (even though so much of ancient Greek literature is lost to us!)?
Cats, chariots and cracking skulls: an Ashtart primer
The cover illustration was drawn for me by Yacmo Tsuji - please check their work out.
Some deities have very questionable luck. Even if well attested - not just in offering lists and theophoric names, but even in myths - they struggle with gaining recognition in the present. Ashtart is one such example; plagued by unwarranted conflations, questionable past scholarship, and lack of attention.
This article is a brief overview of the three main text corpora dealing with her (Ugarit, Emar and Egypt, with small additions from elsewhere). Some information about other deities with cognate names will be provided as well.
The material from Ugarit includes a survey of myths featuring Ashtart - from the (relatively) famous Baal Cycle to obscure and fragmentary compositions (including one which compares her to a large cat); a brief overview of her associations with other major deities (specifically Anat and Baal); as well as a critical evaluation of a bizarre proposal regarding her love life.
As far as Emar is concerned, due to lack of myths I’ll instead look at the three most major of the seventeen (!) hypostases of Ashtart attested in this city. Some space is also dedicated to her unique priestess, the maš’artu, who was possibly responsible for ritually securing victory in battle by communicating with her via a supernatural hotline.
Finally, the section dealing with Egypt will explain how a goddess hailing from northern Syria found herself so far from her original home, why Egyptians adopted her, and how motifs from myths about her were transformed in this new context.
An upcoming article, Sackers of cities, head choppers and manly kings: once more about Anat, can be considered a supplement, but you can read each of them on their own too.
Ashtart or Astarte? A note on romanization and melting goddesses into slurry
Before I’ll begin properly, I feel obliged to once again reiterate my stance on the romanization of Ashtart's name.
I’m not a fan of using Astarte (Άσταρτη) as the default. While sometimes used to refer to material from Ugarit and other bronze age sites (ex. Izak Cornelius, The Many Faces of the Goddess: The Iconography of the Syro-Palestinian Goddesses Anat, Astarte, Qedeshet, and Asherah c. 1500-1000 BCE, p. 93), this name is specifically a Hellenized spelling of a Phoenician theonym (Aren M. Wilson-Wright, Athtart: The Transmission and Transformation of a Goddess in the Late Bronze Age, p. 146).
Very little material discussed in this article is Phoenician. And virtually none of it has anything to do with Greek reception of Phoenician (or any other) material. I will therefore stick to referring to the discussed deity as Ashtart - a romanization closer to the spelling of her name in the text corpora I’ll discuss in the late bronze age.
A major issue with the use of the romanization “Astarte” is that it often leads to both unintended misconceptions and fully intentional unwarranted conflations. Evidence from different cultures and time periods is lumped together without concern to create a composite deity - an unchanging goddess who’s somehow identical in Ugarit in the late bronze age, in Phoenicia in the last centuries BCE, and in many other places and times. She’s also, somehow, interchangeable with numerous others, from biblical asherah pole and Carthaginian Tanith (Athtart…, p. 6-7) to Isis, Aphrodite and Mesopotamian Ishtar (ibidem, p. 9).
This ignoble tradition goes back directly to James G. Frazer and his Golden Bough, though in the case of Ashtart it’s also impossible to downplay the role of the Bible scholar W. F. Albright and his students like Frank Moore Cross (ibidem, p. 4-6). The goal is always the same, though - presenting goddesses as interchangeable is meant to boil them into a slurry, some sort of poorly defined “feminine principle” with no individual traits. Nebulous associations with “fertility” and sexuality are used to fill in the blanks (Jo Ann Hackett, Can a Sexist Model Liberate Us? Ancient near Eastern "Fertility" Goddesses, p. 75). Ashtart in particular has suffered badly from his misconception in past scholarship (Rüdiger Schmitt, Mistress of Horses, Lady of the Chariot: The Warrior Aspect of Astarte, p. 213-214). This article is my own small attempt at countering this problem.
A peculiar star? On Ashtart’s name
Ashtart’s name has a considerable number of cognates. Across the various languages from the Semitic family, four categories pretty clearly going back to the same root are attested: feminine theonyms with the expected feminine suffix -t (like the name of the discussed goddess); feminine theonyms lacking this suffix (like Ishtar in Akkadian); masculine theonyms (like the Ugaritic god Attar); and a number of ordinary grammatically feminine nouns referring to heaven or stars (Athtart…, p. 16-17). The last category is attested only in languages spoken in Ethiopia and Eritrea - Ge’ez, Amharic and Tigre (ibidem, p. 18-19). Wilson-Wright argues that this might reflect the original meaning of the word, relying on the fact an astral role is directly attested for some - but not all - deities with cognate names (ibidem, p. 21).
While this is not an unconvincing etymology, some caution might be necessary, though. For instance, it’s regularly claimed that Ashtart was an astral deity. However, this argument depends entirely on her name being a cognate of Mespotamian Ishtar, whose astral qualifications are undeniable. For her “relative” direct evidence is actually lacking, though. If she was viewed as astral in the main areas where she was worshiped - like in Ugarit and Emar, which the bulk of this article will be dedicated to - it was clearly an aspect of her character of little importance (Mark S. Smith, ‛Athtart in Late Bronze Age Syrian Texts, p. 37).
It should also be noted that this etymology of Ashtart’s name and its cognates is part of a broader proposal courtesy of Wilson-Wright. She argues the original root - which has an awkward number of consonants by the standards of Semitic languages - was actually a borrowing from another language family, specifically the (now extinct) Anatolian branch of Indo-European. The Hittite word for a star, ḫasterza, would thus be a distant cognate too (Athtart…, p. 23-24).
Appealing as this idea might be at first glance, a huge dose of caution is necessary, though. Timothy D. Leonard in an evaluation of Wilson-Wright’s work notes that the root originating in a loanword would explain many of the phonetic problems not accounted for in earlier proposals. However, at the same time would require contact between speakers of Semitic and Anatolian languages to happen much earlier than first attested (effectively before the former split!). Furthermore, it’s not clear what cultural rationale there would be for borrowing an astronomical term which already had an equivalent, just to use it in a way not attested for it in any of the Anatolian languages (Ištar in Ḫatti: The Disambiguation of Šavoška and Associated Deities in Hittite Scribal Practice, p. 40-41).
Wilson-Wright suggests that the earliest theonym derived from this root was feminine but didn’t actually have a feminine suffix, while Ashtart’s name was an attempt at “fixing” this issue. Possibly it happened more than once, even; on linguistic grounds it can be assumed that it occurred separately in Ugarit and in Phoenicia, for instance. The related masculine theonyms would similarly be a secondary development, unrelated to Ashtart herself (Athtart…, p. 19). For instance, it’s safe to assume the existence of a male god with a clearly cognate name in southern Arabia in the first millennium BCE was an entirely unrelated development, and that his name arose independently from the same root (ibidem, p. 20).
In some cases, cognates of the name without the feminine suffix can be a subject of debate - for example, a deity worshiped in Ebla in the third millennium BCE whose name was usually written as Ašdar been variously interpreted as Ashtart, Attar (Mark S. Smith, The Ugaritic Baal Cycle. Volume I. Introduction with Text, Translations and Commentary of KTU 1.1-1.2, p. 240-241) or a deity ultimately closest to Mesopotamian Ishtar (Inanna), even if not identical with her (Alfonso Archi, Išḫara and Aštar at Ebla: Some Definitions, p. 15-16).
As a side note, I feel obliged to point out that contrary to a persistent misconception popular in certain circles online, no form of the name has anything to do with the biblical asherah pole or any theonyms phonetically related to it. The resemblance is entirely down to romanization; Ashtart’s name starts with an ayin, not an aleph (Steve A. Wiggins, A Reassessment of Asherah With Further Considerations of the Goddess, p. 57).
“A mighty panther is Ashtart”: the Ugaritic texts
The ruins of Ugarit in 2008 (wikimedia commons).
With abstract linguistic considerations now out of the way, it’s time to look at the text corpora Ashtart is best attested in, starting with Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra), located in northern Syria, on the Mediterranean coast. The bulk of the texts from this city have been written in a unique alphabetic script derived from cuneiform, which was in use for some 80 years immediately before the destruction of the city in 1185 BCE (Athtart…, p. 121). Standard syllabic cuneiform is attested in the city earlier as well, though it was never used for, say, writing down local myths, in contrast with the new script (ibidem, p. 125). Two versions of the same text - a list of offerings - indicate that Ishtar’s name was used to represent Ashtart when writing in standard syllabic cuneiform. However, the spelling of the name in the alphabetic script - 'ṯtrt - leaves no ambiguity; Ashtart was clearly the deity meant (ibidem, p. 113).
While it’s clear Ashtart was a goddess of some importance in Ugarit, there’s a degree of discrepancy between her placement in different genres of texts. In offering lists she doesn’t seem all that important, relatively speaking. On the other hand, in a more politically charged context, like in official letters, she occupies an elevated position. The most prominent example, sent to an unidentified Ugaritic king by an official residing in Alashiya (Cyprus) lists her in the second place, right after Baal and before Anat and “eternal sun” (ie. Shapash) - in other words, at the very top of the divine hierarchy (‛Athtart…, p. 41-43).
The texts discovered so far provide little solid information about the temple(s) and clergy of Ashtart. It’s possible a temple or shrine dedicated to her was located in the royal palace. There’s also a single reference to a “kunaḫi house” belonging to her, similarly presumed to fulfill a religious role. As for clergy, there are isolated references to “singers” and “servants” of Ashtart, but nothing more solid (‛Athtart…, p. 38-39).
Seated figure of an unidentified goddess from Ugarit (wikimedia commons).
It’s also known that at least one cult statue of Ashtart existed in the city - references to preparation of clothing for it are known (ibidem, p. 39). However, no figures in Ugaritic art have been conclusively identified as Ashtart. At most seated female figures might give us a vague idea how she would’ve been depicted. In absence of identifying labels caution is necessary, though (Athtart…, p. 114).
The Ugaritic texts associate Ashtart with three spheres of influence: warfare, hunting, and magic (Mistress of…, p. 216-217). Strictly speaking, the label “magico-medical” might be more apt for the third role (Athtart…, p. 27). Additionally she might have also fulfilled other, less significant functions - for instance, a single reference to the existence of a wadi associated with her in the proximity of the city might hint at an association with fishing or shipping (ibidem, p. 139).
Ashtart's association with hunting is most likely reflected in the epithet šd, likely “of the field” or “of the steppe”, in the relevant passage (‛Athtart…, p. 39-40). It might have originally arisen as an attempt at giving her a title similar to ṣēri, applied regularly to a deity designated by the logogram Ishtar - presumably Shaushka - in Hittite treaties and rituals (Athtart…, p. 114).
A second notable title of Ashtart attested in the Ugaritic corpus is ḫr (‛Athtart…, p. 40). Based on texts written in Akkadian, it is to be vocalized as ḫurri, but its precise meaning remains uncertain (Athtart…, p. 107). Two most common explanations are “Hurrian” and “hole” or “grotto”. The former is overall more plausible, but somewhat awkwardly the cult of Ashtart - whether designed as ḫurri or not - shows no meaningful Hurrian influence in Ugarit (ibidem, p. 118-119). There’s only one possible exception - a bilingual ritual which refers to offerings made to Ashtart in Ugaritic, and then switches to Hurrian, with Shaushka, accompanied by the handmaidens Ninatta and Kulitta, the moon god Kusuh and the enigmatic god Nupatik, taking the central stage (ibidem, p. 120).
From the Baal Cycle to fragmentary hymns
One of the tablets of the Baal Cycle (wikimedia commons).
Even otherwise rigorous authors at times claim that Ashtart plays no major role in Ugaritic mythology (ex. Mistress of…, p. 224). While it’s true that she lags behind Baal and Anat in this regard, I think this is incorrect. Hopefully the amount of material in this section will convince you too.
Most of the time, discussion of Ugaritic mythology has to start with the Baal Cycle, and this case is no different. It seems before appearing in person, Ashtart is referenced in it in a curse in an unclear context - possibly it’s a part of a message from Baal to Yam (Baal Cycle vol. 1, p. 264-265). The formula is pretty memorable - “May Horon break your head, Ashtart name of Baal, your skull”; it occurs in the Epic of Keret (or Kirta) as well (Athtart…, p. 133). It’s presumed that it had similar emotional valence to the contemporary phrase “go to hell”. Invoking Horon in it is not surprising - at least in Ugarit he was the god of incantations par excellence, capable of banishing any foe to parts unknown. Meanwhile, Ashtart might be invoked simply due to her belligerent character (Baal Cycle vol. 1, p. 278).
As far as the surviving fragments go, Ashtart makes her proper debut a bit later. After Yam’s messengers make a series of demands to the divine assembly, Baal loses his temper and tries to attack them, which is prevented by an intervention of Ashtart and Anat (Baal Cycle vol. 1, p. 268):
The fact that even the two goddesses portrayed as Baal’s most stalwart allies elsewhere actively prevent him from acting might be meant to illustrate that he’s at his lowest point. Yam is triumphant and making extraordinary demands, and no one is willing to back him up (ibidem, p. 311-312).
Baal’s fortunes eventually reverse. Just as El - the head of the assembly - has previously declared his fate is to be Yam’s captive, after an actual confrontation takes place he gains the upper hand and Ashtart proclaims a similar fate for Yam (ibidem, p. 357).
During the battle Ashtart intervenes from the sidelines, apparently rebuking Baal for unclear reasons. Perhaps she thinks Baal isn’t going far enough, and that she urges him to capitalize on his advantage to finish him off (Theodore J. Lewis, ʿAthtartu’s Incantations and the Use of Divine Names as Weapons, p. 209-210). While this is an isolated minority opinion, I found Theodore J. Lewis' proposal that “rebuke” is a mistranslation and Ashtart might be using an apotropaic formula to help Baal interesting, as well (ibidem, p. 216-218).
The scene as a whole is important for understanding the position of Baal in the cycle and his relationships with other deities. With Yam defeated, Baal can assume kingship, but his position will remain precarious. And, most importantly, it was not attained alone. The help of Ashtart, as well as the craftsman god Kothar-wa-Khasis (who provided Baal with weapons and possibly cheered on him alongside Ashtart), were vital for his success (Baal Cycle vol. 1, p. 361).
Ashtart and Anat are also portrayed cooperating in a myth dealing with El suffering from hangover after overindulging during a feast. They are first portrayed serving meat during the event itself, and later embark on a hunt to acquire ingredients for a cure for El. It seems the composition was an etiological explanation of the origins of a real remedy for hangover used in Ugarit, complete with an instruction on how to prepare it (Athtart…, p. 137).
A myth dealing with Ashtart’s role as a huntress is also known, though it’s quite fragmentary. She apparently embarks on an expedition to the steppe land, hunts unspecified game with a spear, and then serves the meat to El and the moon god Yarikh. The rest of the composition might describe an encounter between Ashtart and Baal, which may or may not be sexual in character, though this is highly speculative (Athtart…, p. 135-137).
Last but not least, a further text focused on Ashtart has been discovered relatively recently - in 1998 - in nearby Ras Ibn Hani (Dennis Pardee, Preliminary Presentation of a New Ugaritic Song to ‘Aṯtartu (RIH 98/02), p. 27). Much remains unclear, but it’s evident that she is described in it as a huntress armed with a bow, which is in line with her portrayal in the two myths already discussed earlier. It is possible that it contains a similar list of vanquished enemies as Anat’s famous speech about monsters from the Baal Cycle (ibidem, p. 35-37). Ashtart’s adversary seems to be a creature referred to as “whelp of El”, who can be reasonably assumed to be a similar being as the “bitch of El” and “calf of El” listed among Anat’s conquests (Athtart…, p. 130).
It seems Ashtart is also metaphorically described in feline terms, which would offer a neat parallel to her Mesopotamian “relative” Ishtar, whose association with big cats is well documented (Preliminary Presentation…, p. 33-35):
Ashtart, Baal and Anat: allies with benefits?
As you probably already noticed, Ashtart appears alongside Anat in two separate cases discussed in the previous section. Those aren’t the only examples. This recurring association is quite easy to explain, given the distinctly belligerent character of both goddesses (Mistress of…, p. 215).
The two seem the most closely connected in anti-snakebite incantations, which you might remember from my article about Shapash and Shamash. There - and only there - they are jointly referred to as Anat-wa-Ashtart, ie. “Anat & Ashtart”. The pair is invoked from Inbubu (‛Athtart…, p. 40). This location is exclusively attested in mythological context, and might not be a real place (Athtart…, p. 139). The very same incantation also separately invokes Ashtart on her own, from Mari (‛Athtart…, p. 40).
Since Inbubu is a location otherwise only associated with Anat, it’s occasionally proposed she and Ashtart are effectively merged into a single deity in the aforementioned text (‛Athtart…, p. 40). However, this is a considerable overinterpretation of the available evidence (Athtart…, p. 140). Ashtart and Anat clearly aren’t interchangeable in the Ugaritic texts (or elsewhere) - it’s possible that even individual hypostases of Ashtart weren’t (Athtart…, p. 141).
What is true is that in addition to their similar character, in all due likeness, Ashtart’s and Anat’s iconography was similar (The Many…, p. 5). It’s pretty much a given that people in antiquity could tell them apart, though - just like a modern catholic will often be able to tell apart saints based on minor details. In absence of accompanying inscriptions, this can be very difficult for researchers today, though (ibidem, p. 6). Similarity in iconography cannot be held as evidence for conflation - in the end it’s comparable to iconographic similarities between Baal and Resheph (ibidem, p. 100).
In particular, the proposal that they merged into Atargatis known from classical sources from across Syria is baseless on both theological and linguistic grounds, and is a relic of antiquated attempts at proving every goddess is actually but an aspect of an underlying all encompassing greater whole (Athtart…, p. 140-141).
It’s evident that Ashtart was also associated in some way with Baal, though she is never addressed as his spouse or sister (Mistress of…, p. 216). It’s safe to say she was regarded as his ally, as evident in the Baal Cycle (Baal Cycle vol. 1, p. 281). Much remains unclear, though. A particular mystery is one of Ashtart’s epithets, which designates her as the šm of Baal. It’s generally accepted that this term literally means “name”, but it’s far from clear what exactly it entails in this context (Athtartu’s Incantations…, p. 208-209). A meaning alongside the lines “alter ego of Baal” has been proposed (Baal Cycle vol. 1, p. 278). However, implicitly interpreting Ashtart as a hypostasis of Baal is obviously implausible (Athtart…, p. 134).
It’s also unclear if the relationship between Baal and Ashtart was ever imagined as romantic and/or sexual. The evidence is unclear at best. For instance, as already noted the myth focused on Ashtart’s hunt might also allude to an encounter of some sort between her and Baal, and someone’s “desire” for someone or something is mentioned, but the passage is simply too fragmentary to determine what’s going on with absolute certainty (‛Athtart…, p. 59-60).
I personally find Daniel Schwemer’s evaluation the most convincing: it’s fairly plausible that individual texts might hint at sexual encounters between Ashtart and Baal, as well as Anat and Baal, but it’s clear that none of them were envisioned as married. It can be also safely assumed that Ashtart was not regarded as the mother of the group of goddesses labeled as Baal’s daughters; she’s only ever an ally who may or may not have other dealings with Baal as well (The Storm-Gods of the Ancient Near East: Summary, Synthesis, Recent Studies: Part II, p. 13-14). I suppose one could refer to this interpretation as “allies with benefits”.
“Ishtarat” and Yam: a goddess that never was and her impact on Ashtart
There’s technically a third proposed close relationship between Ashtart and another deity which continues to pop up in scholarship. It has much more shaky foundations, though. To understand where it came from we need to go further back in time, and a bit further to the east.
At an uncertain point before the Sargonic period (ie. before 2350 BCE or so), a certain Ikun-Shamagan became the king of Mari, a city located close to the border between Iraq and Syria. It’s unknown how long he remained on the throne, and even his placement in the sequence of Mariote rulers is up for debate (Douglas R. Frayne, The Presargonic Period (2700-2350 BC), p. 317).
One of Ikun-Shamagan’s courtiers, a cupbearer named Shu-Weda, dedicated a vessel for the sake of his employer to a pair of deities: Id (“river”) and a goddess who, as it was assumed for a long while, was named Ishtarat or something along those lines. It’s formulaic and not very informative (ibidem, p. 318):
The reading “Ashtarat” or “Ishtarat”, and the resulting assumption Ashtart is the deity meant, goes back to Georges Dossin. However, it should be pointed out he actually read the name not as Ashtart or even as Ishtarat, but as Gishtarat (Manfred Krebernik, Einiger Frühdynastischer Inschriften aus Mari, p. 165). This in turn reflects his perplexing proposal that the theonym Ishtar was a Sumerian compound, a combination of giš and dar, which he translated as “penetrated sex”. Needless to say, to call this implausible would be an understatement (Athtart…, p. 23; Ištar in…, p. 39-40). It’s not even a correct translation - giš dar would actually mean “cut tree” (ibidem, p. 40)... “Ishtarat’s” foundations were therefore always quite shaky.
This issue was first pointed out in 1984 by Manfred Krebernik (of Reallexikon der Assyriologie fame). His reexamination of the text revealed that a misreading was otherwise unknown theonym, ba-sur-ra-at (Zur Lesung…, p. 165).
In 2011, his arguments were expanded upon by Gianni Marchesi and Nicolò Marchetti, who similarly concluded Bassurat is the more likely reading, and etymologized her name as a derivative of the root bsr, “to announce (good news)”. This would mean it can be translated as something along the lines of “annunciation”, a fairly believable theonym (Royal Statuary of Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, p. 228). Dominique Charpin in a review of their work concluded that Krebernik’s reading can now safely be assumed to be correct. In other words, the career of Ishtarat is over.
In theory, this section of the article could end here - there’s no Ashtart in the inscription.
Sadly, it’s not quite as simple. Some time before Krebernik’s paper, Wilfred G. Lambert offered his own treatment of “Ishtarat”. He concluded that the name cannot be a simple variant of Ishtar, and tentatively proposed identification with “Ashtart of Mari”, though not without reservations (The Pantheon of Mari, p. 76; page numbers follow the reprint from Ancient Mesopotamian Religion and Mythology. Selected Essays).
A fresco from Mari showing Ishtar (right) with king Zimri-Lim and an intercessory minor deity (wikimedia commons).
It should be noted that while an “Ashtart of Mari” is indeed attested in Ugarit - she already came up in this article - Wilson-Wright argues that it’s possible that she was actually a goddess who arose in this city, not an import from Mari. In the Old Babylonian period, king Zimri-Lim of Mari visited Ugarit. Wilson-Wright speculates that he and his entourage might’ve compared Ishtar - who is well attested in Mari - with the goddess they encountered in Ugarit, leading the locals to create an “Ashtart of Mari” entirely based on their idea of Mariote culture. Of course, this is all speculation (Athtart…, p. 140). I personally find it quite convincing, though - gods reflecting a culture’s idea about how the deity of another culture would be like, such as Amurru, were fairly common in the “cuneiform world”.
Putting that aside, Lambert assumed that “Ishtarat” and the river god were a couple, though the only evidence he provided is that one is feminine and the other masculine, and that they occur next to each other (The Pantheon…, p. 75). This supposed spousal connection, as he argued, can be extended into a new way to interpret the plot of an Egyptian composition conventionally referred to as the Astarte Papyrus (more on it later), and most importantly to the Baal Cycle (ibidem, p. 76-77).
Neither of those compositions feature a deified river; however, Lambert argued that the sea god Yam played a similar role due to his recurring Ugaritic title “judge Nahar”, ie. “judge River”, which he took for an allusion to river ordeal (ibidem, p. 77). However, river ordeal is not attested in Ugarit. It’s therefore quite unlikely that this title was anything but a way to highlight Yam’s mastery over water (Herbert Niehr, Yammu in RlA vol. 15, p. 143).
As far as I can tell, the reception of Lambert’s interpretation has been mixed at best. For instance, Mark S. Smith in the 1990s described the evidence mustered as “minimal” (Baal Cycle vol. 1, p. 24). Despite that, Noga Ayali-Darshan attempted to not just confirm it, but even expand its scope, in 2010 (‘The Bride of the Sea’: The Traditions about Astarte and Yamm in the Ancient Near East, p. 19). In addition to accepting the premise of Lambert’s article uncritically, she argues that Ashtart is an “erotic” goddess (sic) and therefore it only makes sense to associate her with Yam and to presume a lost scene in the Baal Cycle dealt with his seduction by her since “sea dwelling creatures (...) are associated with lust and sexuality” (ibidem, p. 23; no specific source is provided for this assertion).
In addition to relying on an interpretation of Ashtart’s character which, to put it lightly, has little to do with the primary sources (Mistress of…, p. 214), Ayali-Darshan’s article is riddled with other factual errors. For instance, she incorrectly states that the masculine gender of the river deity is something unique to Mari and distinct from (lower) Mesopotamian tradition in order to make the dubious identification with Yam more plausible (Bride of…, p. 26). However, as argued by Lambert (The Pantheon…, p. 75) and more recently by Marchesi and Marchetti, most likely the dedication invokes the consistently masculine divine representation of river ordeal, well attested across Mesopotamia, not just in Mari (Royal Statuary…, p. 228). The treatment of supplementary material from other text corpora poses other similar problems, as will be demonstrated later.
While ultimately the fact neither Ashtart nor Yam appear in the dedication should be enough to abandon the quest for a love story starring them, it also has to be stressed that a single dedication which doesn’t specify the relationship between invoked deities should never be used as the sole evidence for an alleged relationship in the first place. Yam receives offerings with Baal in one of the Ugaritic ritual texts (Dennis Pardee, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit, p. 20-21) - should we assume they too were a couple?
Jokes aside, Steve A. Wiggins’ warning remains timeless: one should be cautious about taking rudimentary associations like that, lest they are ready to make similarly bold claims about the reasons behind dedicating contemporary churches to two saints at once (A Reassessment…, p. 101).
Last but not least, note that there’s a distinct possibility that lacking a partner was actually seen as Yam’s distinctive characteristic in Ugarit. In the Baal Cycle, after Shapash announces his elevation to kingship, someone complains that a god who lacks a wife is unfit to rule. Depending on restoration, this might be Shapash rebuking Attar, who would like to become king in Yam’s place - but it might also be Attar grumbling that Yam is unfit because he’s single. The passage is too damaged to determine which of these two is the speaker, sadly, but neither option can be easily ruled out (Baal Cycle vol. 1, p. 258).
“Ashtart of battle”: ritual texts from Emar
Tell Meskene in 1998 (wikimedia commons).
The city of Emar (Tell Meskene), located near Aleppo, is already attested in sources from Ebla, around 2400 BCE, and later on in the Old Babylonian Mari corpus. However, most of the texts discovered during excavations are considerably later. They have been written mostly between 1310 and 1187 BCE. It seems that for most of its history Emar was part trading emporium, part agricultural village, with a city council of sorts rather than a hereditary king in charge. A local dynasty of rulers only arose around 1400 BCE. Less than a century later the Hittite Empire under Muršili II conquered Emar and turned it into a frontier military outpost. The local dynasty was deposed, and a new one subordinate to the Hittite viceroy residing in Carchemish was installed. However, the Hittite administration seemingly didn’t replace local religious officials, with the “diviner of the gods of Emar” enjoying particular prestige and autonomy (Athtart…, p. 73-75).
What’s most important for Ashtart is that it has been argued that the evidence pertaining to her found in Emar is complementary with the Ugaritic texts. While Ugarit provided more literary texts, Emariote finds are almost entirely ritual in character (‛Athtart…, p. 34).
It’s indisputable that Ashtart was a prominent goddess in Emar (‛Athtart…, p. 44). No less than 17 hypostases of her are attested (Athtart…, p. 72). Rather surprisingly, no study of Ashtart before the 2010s took the material from this city into account, though (‛Athtart…, p. 33).
Very few sources from Emar refer to Ashtart using phonetic spellings of her name. Most of the time, she is represented by a logogram - either the “Akkadogram” Ishtar or “Sumerogram” Inanna. That in at least in some cases Ashtart is meant is confirmed by sporadic use of phonetic aš-tar-ti which alternates with both logograms. The phonetic spelling is also common in theophoric names. However, in some cases a different goddess (or multiple goddesses) might be hiding behind the logograms; a degree of caution is necessary (Athtart…, p. 77-78).
One exception might be the goddess Aštar-ṣarba, “poplar Ashtar”, who was seemingly a relic going all the way back to the times of Ebla. Her name contains an archaic Akkadian cognate of Ashtart’s (ibidem, p. 84-85).
Ashtart’s role as a divine huntress was well known in Emar, as evidenced by references to the “hunt of Ashtart” (ṣadu ša Aštart). It has to be pointed out hunting was not necessary for subsistence in Emar in the late second millennium BCE. However, the hunt of Ashtart could be a ritualized echo of her original role in a less urbanized environment (ibidem, p. 87).
It’s not clear what the hunt entailed, though. It might’ve simply been an actual hunt meant to honor a goddess fond of such endeavors. A more speculative interpretation also exists: the “hunt” is metaphorical, and might reflect a hitherto unknown myth in which Ashtart ends up lost in some way or another, and has to be recovered, similarly to Ugaritic Baal in the Baal Cycle (Athtart…, p. 83). The latter option is less likely in the light of the portrayal of Ashtart as a huntress in other text corpora, though (ibidem, p. 87).
The warlike role is well documented, too. As a matter of fact, the single best attested form of Ashtart in Emar is “Ashtart of battle” (Aštart ša tāḫāzi). She occurs under this title in numerous ritual texts. She also had her own cultic personnel, including a high-ranking priestess, the maš’artu. This position was held for life, with a new priestess only appointed if the previous one died or was too sick to continue upholding her religious duties (ibidem, p. 89).
While there’s no consensus about the origins of the term maš’artu, it might be a cognate of Akkadian ša’āru, “to conquer” or “to be victorious”. If so, we might be dealing with a title along the lines of “priestess of military success”. It’s worth noting it’s possible that the maš’artu took part in military campaigns herself, likely to guarantee Ashtart’s support for Emariote troops, which lends further support to this interpretation (ibidem, p. 91-93).
Among her duties was bathing the statue of Ashtart - possibly to symbolically purify the goddess after she took part in warfare. Comparisons with Anat bathing herself after slaughtering enemies in the Baal Cycle have been made (ibidem, p. 90).
A further hypostasis which warrants some discussion is Ashtart ša abi. This byname sparked a number of interpretations (ibidem, p. 100-101). She most notably appears in a list of offerings for a festival known as zukru. She’s paired with a god whose name is suspiciously similar to Yam’s in it (Daniel E. Fleming, The Installation of Baal’s High Priestess At Emar: A Window on Ancient Syrian Religion, p. 300).
The presence of Yam next to this specific form of Ashtart led to the rise of a proposal ša abi was a marine epithet related to the sumerogram A.AB.BA, “sea”, though this is far from being the consensus position today. As far as I can tell, this has been first questioned by Daniel E. Fleming in 1992. He suggested that it might instead be a reference to either the abi - a type of offering pit which originated in Hurrian tradition - or to the word ab(u), “father”, metaphorically used to refer to ancestors. Either option could reflect an association with ancestor worship - possibly something alongside the Ugaritic concept of ilib, divine ancestors. Quite importantly, the rites dedicated to Ashtart ša abi took place in the month Abû, which was seemingly a time of funerary rites (ibidem, p. 300-301).
Fleming later pointed out that while the discussed epithet occurs at Emar multiple times, Yam is absent from all the other texts it is attested in (Time at Emar: The Cultic Calendar and the Rituals from the Diviner’s Archive, p. 187).
For what it’s worth, in the most recent treatment of the zukru I’m aware of, John T. Thames translates the discussed title as “of the abi” (The Politics of Ritual Change. The zukru Festival in the Political History of Late Bronze Age Emar, p. 100). He doesn’t discuss it further, but it’s pretty clear he likewise doesn’t see it as a reference to any bodies of water.
While other authors generally depend on evidence from Emar itself to evaluate the epithet, Ayali-Darshan - who sees it as supporting evidence for Ashtart and Yam being regarded as a couple - asserts that it is actually to be found in lower Mesopotamia too. She states that her “Astarte of the sea” hides behind epithets of Mesopotamian Ishtar containing terms referring to the sea (The Bride…, p. 25).
However, these are actually completely irrelevant to her argument. All of them are designations of a hypostasis of Ishtar associated with the Sealand - the southernmost section of the Euphrates and the coast of the Persian Gulf. This region was called (māt) tâmti in Akkadian and (KUR) A.AB.BA in Sumerian. The English translation “Sealand” is literal (Odette Boivin, The First Dynasty of the Sealand in Mesopotamia, p. 22-23). The existence of an “Ishtar of the Sealand” is hardly surprising considering she was an important goddess for the rulers of this area. This is well demonstrated by her appearance in the royal epic of Gulkishar (ibidem, p. 30).
This is sadly not the time or place for dissecting Gulkishar’s career and the accuracy of the epic starring him in detail; I feel obliged to let you know that his regnal name means “raider of the totality” (ibidem, p. 39). In other words, it’s a moderately successful attempt at coining a name which would mean, more or less, “conqueror of the world”.
Going back to Emar, it's pretty clear that most authors are fairly sure that there was no marine hypostasis of Ashtart in the local pantheon. Even if the precise meaning of her epithet under discussion is up for debate, it seems likely it had something to do with ancestor worship instead. In any case, any connection with Yam can be safely ruled out.
Ashtart and the weather god of Emar
The better established and less baseless debate about Ashtart’s love life has its Emariote reflection, too. It has been argued that, for instance, the popularity of the theophoric names Zū-Ba’la and Zū-Aštarti coupled with absence of similar names invoking other deities proves the two were viewed as a couple. However, as soberly noted by Wilson-Wright, the names indicate little beyond the two being comparably popular among Emar’s populace. The fact Baal’s lead priestess, the entu, was appointed ceremonially in a similar way to the mašartu also doesn’t say much about Baal and Ashtart themselves (Athtart…, p. 94-95).
While as I said before I think it’s sensible to assume the Ugaritic material reflects some sort of relationship between Baal and Ashtart, it has to be stressed that it cannot be used to prove this was also the case in Emar. The Emariote weather god was a wholly separate entity; he wasn’t even consistently referred to as Baal, most likely. The city was the westernmost limit of the spread of this convention, but in different linguistic contexts the same weather god could be referred to as Teshub or Addu (Adad). Similarly, his relationships with other deities might’ve reflected Mesopotamian and Hurrian tradition more closely (The Storm-Gods…, p. 14).
Ultimately the only firm evidence for the existence of some association between Ashtart and the weather god in Emar are the references to “Ashtart of the temple of Baal” (INANNA É IŠKUR-ma). While this clearly implies that a hypostasis of her was worshiped in a temple of Baal or at least was associated with it in some other way, it provides no hints for how the relationship between the two deities was envisioned. Therefore, while it cannot be fully ruled out that they were perceived as a couple, it might also be that they were viewed as siblings or simply as allies (Athtart…, p. 97-98).
Hebat (right) and Teshub on a Hurro-Hittite relief from Yazılıkaya (wikimedia commons).
Daniel Schemer points out that a further obstacle for interpreting the weather god and Ashtart as a couple is the presence of Hebat in the local pantheon. He argues that she is more likely to be his spouse, in line with both inland Syrian and Hurrian tradition. He speculates that the relationship between him and Ashtart might have accordingly resembled that between Teshub and Shaushka in Hurrian mythology. An arrangement in which Hebat played the role of an official spouse and Ashtart that of a mistress in theory cannot be excluded - local pantheons with a similar structure are well known from the first millennium BCE - but there’s no actual evidence for such an interpretation from Emar itself (The Storm-Gods…, p. 14).
“Angry and raging goddess”: Egyptian sources
A stela of Ramses II showing him in the company of Ashtart (right), with the Seth animal depicted above them (Louvre).
Ashtart first appears in Egyptian sources in the fifteenth century BCE (the New Kingdom period), with the earliest examples dated to the reign of either Thutmose III or Amenhotep II. That’s actually slightly earlier than the oldest surviving texts mentioning her from either Ugarit or Emar - even though she was not a deity native to Egypt (Athtart…, p. 27).
Ashtart’s introduction roughly coincided with the “debuts” of a few other foreign deities in the Egyptian pantheon: Baal, Resheph, Horon and Anat. It has been proposed that they were either transmitted by prisoners of war who brought their deities with them, or through deliberate royal policy of the pharaohs (ibidem, p. 28). It’s quite possible that both theories are correct at once. There probably was no single event resulting in the transmission of Ashtart (or the other deities) to Egypt, but rather multiple separate introductions spread over a period of time (ibidem, p. 31).
A common assumption is that one of the main reasons behind the embrace of Ashtart was the lack of a native deity who could be linked with war chariots, or more broadly with the use of horses in warfare (Athtart…, p. 29). The earliest Egyptian references to Ashtart pretty much uniformly associate her with the training of chariot horses for the elite of ancient Egyptian society - an activity in terms of prestige comparable to car racing today (Athtart…, p. 37). It therefore should come as no surprise that even Amenhotep II himself boasted that he got to work in the royal stables as a youth. He supposedly became an extraordinary horse trainer. Such was his skill that, as he claims, Ashtart and Resheph rejoiced when they saw him in action (ibidem, p. 38).
However, it has to be stressed both horses and chariots were already well known in Egypt by then - the oldest evidence comes from the seventeenth century BCE, and they became a mainstay of Egyptian military after Ahmose I expelled the Hyksos in the sixteenth (Athtart…, p. 37-38).
Furthermore, as pointed out by Dennis Pardee, the equestrian association is missing from Ugaritic compositions dealing with Ashtart’s belligerent side (Preliminary Presentation…, p. 35). An isolated reference to a “horse of Ashtart” has only been identified in what’s most likely an account of an oracular dream (Mistress of…, p. 216). However, even if it reflects an otherwise unattested equestrian aspect of her character at Ugarit, it’s not clear if it was entirely comparable to her association with horses in Egypt (Athtart…, p. 141).
Ashtart as a horse archer on an Egyptian stela (wikimedia commons).
As a reflection of her primary role, Ashtart could be depicted on horseback in Egypt. In most cases there’s no sign of a saddle, with only reins used; the only exceptions presently known are two depictions showing her in a side-saddle (The Many…, p. 77-78). In a few cases she’s riding in a chariot instead (ibidem, p. 40). While textual sources every now and then link Anat with horses and chariots too, so far no certain evidence that this was reflected in iconography is known, making identification of unlabeled examples as Ashtart rather than Anat more sound (ibidem, p. 42). However, caution is necessary - ultimately not every figure on horseback is a deity, let alone specifically Ashtart (ibidem, p. 40). On the other hand, it has to be taken into account that even though consistently referred to as a goddess, she could sometimes appear somewhat androgynous in Egyptian art (Christiane Zivie-Coche, Foreign Deities in Egypt in the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, p. 6).
It probably comes as no surprise that Ashtart was also typically depicted armed. The weapons are not very consistent, though - axes, maces, spears and shields are all attested in art. She was also uniquely depicted with a bow. Furthemore, in some cases generic typical divine attributes such as the was sceptre or the ankh show up too (The Many…, p. 75-76).
While well documented, Ashtart’s belligerence wasn’t her only trait in Egypt. Some of the titles she acquired - like “mistress of all the gods” or “mistress of the two lands” - are feminine forms of titles of major gods such as Amun, or originate in the titulature of Egyptian royalty. Presumably they’re meant to show her close association with royal power. Likewise, this role is probably reflected in Ramses II’s decision to name two of his sons in her honor (Keiko Tazawa, Syro-Palestinian Deities in New Kingdom Egypt, p. 134). #6 bore the name Ashtarthirwonmef, “Ashtart is on his right side”, and #26 - Meryashtart, “beloved of Ashtart” (ibidem, p. 95).
“Hurrian Ashtart” or Shaushka?
The stela of Rom (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek; reproduced here for educational purposes only, original source is a dead link).
At least one of Ashtart’s epithets used in Egypt - ḫꜢrw - indicates that she was probably introduced from somewhere outside the stretch of Levantine coast under direct Egyptian control, possibly from some more distant locale in inland Syria. It’s even possible that the enigmatic Ashtart ḫurri best known from Ugarit was the deity transferred (Athtart…, p. 66).
The oldest known reference of Ashtart ḫꜢrw is generally assumed to be the votive stela of a certain Ram, otherwise notable for the unusually realistic portrait of the dedicant. He’s shown with a deformed right leg (possibly a result of undergoing polio), and he’s using a walking stick. In the accompanying inscription in hieratic he asks Ashtart for happiness and “a beautiful burial in the western desert of Memphis” (Athtart…, p. 62-63).
Putting Ram’s personal struggles aside, the byname of Ashtart he included in his dedication is pretty clearly a loanword which goes back to the already mentioned term ḫurri, ie. “Hurrian”. As Hurrian was commonly spoken across Syria in the second half of the second millennium BCE, in Egypt this label came to designate the region as a whole. Therefore, most translators assume from Egyptian perspective Ashtart ḫꜢrw would be “Syrian Ashtart” rather than “Hurrian Ashtart” (ibidem, p. 65).
Ram and his family were likely foreigners, so for him she could instead be an “Ashtart from back home”, if you will. Not everyone who worshiped her in Egypt was a foreigner, though - another dedication comes from Ptahankh, a priest of Ptah (ibidem, p. 66).
Shaushka (right) with Ninatta and Kulitta on a relief from Yazılıkaya (wikimedia commons).
It should be noted that despite the Hurrian-adjacent aspect of Ashtart’s career in Egypt, her Hurrian credentials are sometimes a bit exaggerated in scholarship. To be specific, there’s an erroneous view that her introduction had something to do with a statue sent to Amenhotep III by his father-in-law, king Tushratta of Mittanni, the preeminent Hurrian state. In theory, the accompanying letter - which is written in Akkadian (the language of international diplomacy at the time) - does use a logogram which could stand for Ashtart, namely INANNA. However, Tushratta specifies that the deity the statue represents comes from Nineveh. Therefore, it’s pretty clear that Shaushka - the tutelary deity of this city at the time - is meant. And on top of that, multiple Egyptian attestations of Ashtart predate Amenhotep III’s reign. Part of the confusion stems from inconsistent rendering of the logogram in translations, resulting in “Ishtar of Nineveh” instead of “Shaushka of Nineveh”; neither is incorrect, but elsewhere Tushratta spelled Shaushka’s name phonetically. However, even that doesn’t justify the jump from Ishtar to Ashtart. Especially since Egyptian transcriptions of Akkadian theophoric names invoking Ishtar imply she was not seen as identical with Ashtart (Athtart…, p. 29-30).
Two dads and old friends: Ashtart and other deities
A late statue of Ptah (wikimedia commons).
After her introduction to Egypt, possibly as early as during the reign of Amenhotep II, Ashtart came to be regarded as a daughter of Ptah (Athtart…, p. 66). On a stela from Memphis, they are even depicted together (The Many…, p. 26). It’s possible that at least in Memphis Ashtart was believed to intercede with her father on behalf of petitioners (Athtart…, p. 65).
Mark S. Smith proposes that the Egyptian tradition about Ashtart’s parentage might’ve been an adaptation of a tradition portraying her as a daughter of El (‛Athtart…, p. 66). For what it’s worth, it has been suggested that an association between El and Ptah is implied in an inscription from Serabit el-Khadim, though the former is not directly mentioned (Mark S. Smith, Wayne T. Pitard, The Ugaritic Baal cycle. Volume II. Introduction with Text, Translations and Commentary of KTU 1.3-1.4., p. 555). I think caution is required, though. Ultimately providing Ashtart with an Egyptian parent might’ve simply been a way to integrate her better into the pantheon, with no direct predecessor tradition from elsewhere (Athtart…, p. 97).
A different Egyptian genealogy of Ashtart is known from the Contendings of Horus and Seth, where both Ashtart and Anat are daughters of Ra (The Many…, p. 85-86). This might be a local tradition from Thebes, since a colophon indicates this famous composition originates there (Athtart…, p. 57-58). Ashtart and Anat play no major role in it, though - they’re merely mentioned in passing by Neith, who is one of the judges in the eponymous contendings. She rules in favor of Horus, but instructs Ennead to give Seth a compensation prize, including Re’s daughters Anat and Ashtart (William Kelly Simpson et al., The Literature of Ancient Egypt, p. 93-94; all page numbers follow the 3rd edition).
As you can probably tell, the passage above indicates the pairing with Anat wasn’t limited to Ugarit. It’s curiously actually more common in Egyptian sources, if anything. It occurs particularly often in incantations against snakebite and crocodiles. It’s clear that they represent the same tradition as the already discussed Ugaritic incantation against snakebite, but the direction of the transfer is unclear - it might be that Egyptians received Ashtart and her bff prepackaged with information about this area of expertise and sample incantations, but it actually cannot be ruled out the pairing of the two in this role was an Egyptian invention then imported to Ugarit, either (Athtart…, p. 68). It should be noted that in contrast with the passage from the Contendings of Horus and Seth, in most cases the two aren’t explicitly identified as sisters (Foreign Deities…, p. 6).
Baal-like Seth or Seth-like Baal (left) receiving offerings on a stela of Ramses II (wikimedia commons).
The association with Seth is a more complex issue. The passage from the Contendings of Horus and Seth appears to portray both Ashtart and Anat as his prospective brides, though this view is not universally accepted. The interpretation ultimately depends on the evaluation of the nature of the connection between Ashtart and Baal in other text corpora (‛Athtart…, p. 60).
This might sound bizarre at first glance, but bear in mind that in the New Kingdom period, Seth was partially amalgamated with Baal (or vice versa). There are cases where Baal’s name was written with the Seth animal sign as a determinative of sorts, but also depictions of Seth as a Baal-like “foreign” god, with a normal human face. There seemingly were two different phenomena at play - Seth acquiring traits of Baal to better represent his control over foreign lands, and Baal acquiring some traits of Seth to better integrate him into the Egyptian pantheon. The latter is particularly well documented in Memphis (Foreign Deities…, p. 5). Coincidentally so is the recognition of some sort of connection between him and Ashtart (Baal Cycle vol. 1, p. 279).
Fighting the sea (again)
The surviving fragments of the Astarte Papyrus (wikimedia commons).
A further major source presumably reflecting the perception of the relationship between Ashtart and Baal and/or Seth in Egypt is a composition usually referred to as the Astarte Papyrus or Astarte and the Sea. The title is somewhat of a misnomer, though - Ashtart doesn’t exactly take the center stage (Athtart…, p. 55).
The sole fragmentary copy dates to either the eighteenth or nineteenth dynasty (Baal Cycle vol. 1, p. 34). A composition date during the reign of Amenhotep II has been proposed, but isn’t universally accepted (Athtart…, p. 55).
It’s pretty clear that the Astarte Papyrus shares a number of similarities with the Yam section of the Baal Cycle - most notably a conflict which involves Yam demanding tribute from other gods, and the involvement of Ashtart (Baal Cycle vol. 1, p. 23). It’s sometimes argued that it was directly derived from the Baal Cycle itself, though influences from other works have been proposed as well (The Literature…, p. 108). Possibly the large community of foreigners living in Memphis had a role in its transmission, though it remains unclear just how much constitutes an Egyptian innovation. One major difference is that Ashtart actually plays a somewhat different role than in Ugarit (Baal Cycle vol. 1, p. 25).
A figure of Renenutet from the first millennium BCE (wikimedia commons).
While due to fragmentary preservation full plot cannot be restored, parts of it can be reconstructed with reasonable certainty. The gods - specifically the Ennead - are seemingly threatened by Yam, and decide to deliver tribute to him. Initially Renenutet is selected, and brings Yam a selection of precious stones. Something’s evidently not working as intended, though, since after a lacuna she suggests tasking Ashtart - addressed as daughter of Ptah - with it next. She is less than thrilled - she actually breaks down in tears upon hearing the request. However, she does as instructed… just to hear even more demands. Yam demands increasingly precious objects, including a necklace belonging to Nut and Geb’s signet ring. It’s revealed that if Yam’s request is not fulfilled, he’ll cover the world with his waters. At this point Seth enters the scene, but the rest of the composition is lost (The Literature…, p. 109-111).
Presumably the now lost ending was centered on Yam’s defeat at the hands of Seth. This is confirmed by a number of medical incantations, which allude to Seth and/or Baal vanquishing him (The Bride…, p. 20). It seems no further interactions between Yam and Ashtart occur, though (‛Athtart…, p. 67). If this assumption is correct, the Egyptian version doesn’t offer a parallel to her involvement in the battle itself.
As in the case of the Baal Cycle and the material from Emar, Ayali-Darshan likewise attempted to prove that the narrative has romantic undertones. She argues that Yam desires Ashtart by the time the meeting between them ends (The Bride…, p. 20). However, Smith points out the fact that Yam seemingly refers to Ashtart as “angry and raging goddess” doesn’t exactly imply any deeper connection between the two. The lists of Yam’s demands may or may not include someone’s daughter, but that’s far from clear (‛Athtart…, p. 67).
Ayali-Darshan supplements the Astarte Papyrus with a second composition, the Tale of the Two Brothers (aka Papyrus d’Orbiney). She argues that the fact Yam appears to desire the wife of the main character, Bata, can be considered further evidence (The Bride…, p. 21). Note that Bata’s wife is not Ashtart, nor even a goddess, but rather a nameless woman created as a companion for him by Khnum at Ra’s request (The Literature…, p. 85-86).
As soberly noted by both Smith (‛Athtart…, p. 67) and Wilson-Wright, this is quite a perplexing attempt - once again, the Tale of the Two Brothers at no point mentions Ashtart (Athtart…, p. 101 fn. 139). At most you could perhaps use it to argue that, at least in Egyptian literature, Yam was more or less consistently portrayed as lecherous, I suppose.
From Ashtart to Astarte?
While Ugarit and Emar both ceased to be after the bronze age collapse, in Egypt Ashtart lingered on well into the Roman period (Mistress of…, p. 223). A text from the Ptolemaic period confirms she retained her old responsibilities - she is still the “mistress of horses, lady of the chariot” in it (ibidem, p. 222).
For completeness’ sake it’s also worth noting Ashtart appears in a theophoric name from Alalakh roughly contemporary with the Ugaritic material (‛Athtart…, p. 34). This is quite notable since this city shows multiple similarities with Ugarit, including in the religious sphere (Mary E. Buck, The Amorite Dynasty of Ugarit: Historical Implications of Linguistic and Archaeological Parallels, p. 261). For instance, it’s the only known location outside Ugarit where Shapash was definitely known (ibidem, p. 263-264). It’s also the single site most similar to Ugarit as far as the archaeological data goes (ibidem, p. 259). However, as far as I’m aware no notable references to Ashtart have emerged from it so far.
There’s some evidence that in some cases Egyptian Ashtart was imported to levantine sites (Athtart…, p. 68-69). However, overall comparatively little is known about the pantheon(s) of coastal areas further south than Ugarit (like the kingdom of Amurru) and it cannot be automatically assumed that the area was culturally homogeneous, or similar to Ugarit (The Many…, p. 18).
A possile Phoenician depiction of enthroned Astarte from Cyprus (wikimedia commons).
It’s sometimes argued that the Phoenician goddess known to Greeks as Astarte, worshiped in cities like Sidon or Tyre in the first millennium BCE, evolved from the one known from bronze age sources discussed in this article and they are to be considered one and the same (ex. Mistress of…, p. 224), I personally lean towards the view that we should be speaking of multiple goddesses whose names happen to go back to the same root, though (Athtart…, p. 146). Even similarly named goddesses, at the end of the day, are not necessarily identical, though. The burden of proof should be on those who seek to prove that every single similarly named deity is part of a greater whole - though sadly that is still far from being the standard (ibidem, p. 9).
Few things demonstrate the need for caution better than the fact a cognate of Ashtart’s name, as already discussed earlier, is attested as the name of an ostensibly male deity in Sabaic - a language spoken historically in the south of the Arabian peninsula; very obviously this god had little to do with her (ibidem, p. 13).
In the case of Phoenician Astarte, the most important factor for making a distinction is her character, in my opinion. She was never depicted as armed, though, and only appears in association with warfare in a treaty between king Baal of Tyre and Esarhaddon of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Most likely she was primarily regarded as a generally benevolent figure, closely tied to royalty (Mistress of…, p. 217-218).
A number of attested cases of interpretatio graeca and romana also speak against any more significant martial role - Astarte is identified with Aphrodite, Hera and a number of other goddesses depending on location, but never with Athena or any other warlike deity (ibidem, p. 219). On the other hand, she was clearly associated with seafaring (Athtart…, p. 149).
Hopefully future studies, instead of necessarily assuming deities with cognate names were identical, will attempt to untangle the history of Phoenician Astarte. The textual record from her major cult centers is at best imperfect, but surely Wilson-Wright is right that it’s ripe for similar approaches as those currently applied to bronze age sources from Ugarit or Emar (ibidem, p. 146).
Conclusions
As this article has hopefully demonstrated, the sources from Ugarit, Emar and Egypt paint a fairly coherent image of Ashtart, contrary to some opinions in older (and sometimes current) scholarship - Theodore J. Lewis notes that in less than rigorous publications she “has either been minimized to the point of boredom or eroticized to the point of orgy” (Athtartu’s Incantations…, p. 225). Sometimes both approaches coexist - in at least one case I’m aware of, claims that her character is poorly defined are made specifically to defend her mischaracterization as an erotic or “fertile” goddess (Neal H. Walls, The Goddess Anat in Ugaritic Myth, p. 110-113).
However, it’s pretty clear that Ashtart’s character was fairly well defined, and had little to do with sexuality (let alone some more abstract “fertility”). Despite the distance between the discussed areas, the same elements recur - she was associated with warfare, hunting and certain types of incantations, especially against snakebite; she is an ally or otherwise an associate of Baal (or at another similar god); with the exception of Emar, the evidence for her association with Anat is consistent too.
The same goes for her hostility towards Yam. The periodically reemerging claims that their relationship was romantic instead ultimately rest on shaky foundations and abandoned readings. I don’t want to be rude, but the entire attempt at resurrecting this proposal seems to resemble a certain genre of contemporary romance fiction. Of course, the fact that it can be soundly rejected that there was anything but hostility going on between Ashtart and Yam doesn’t automatically answer the question of either deity’s relationship status - it ought to remain open. Perhaps Yam did have a spouse in Emar, for all we know.
Hopefully the future will bring more in depth studies of Ashtart which don’t treat her simply as an extension of another deity; I believe the material is both abundant enough and thrilling enough to warrant much more than was already written about her. I personally think inquiries into Ashtart’s association with primarily masculine spheres of activity could be particularly interesting - similar studies of Anat and Mesopotamian Ishtar already exist, surely it would make sense for her to be next.
Hades glazers 🤝 the kind of people one can find on the Greek mythology subreddit, who do their best to diminish and insult him and act like he is somehow worse than his peers
Both of these groups are insufferable and actively make Greek mythology comunities worse.
I just finished reading ‘Athtart: The Transmission and Transformation of a Goddess in the Late Bronze Age’ by Aren M. Wilson-Wright, a book about, as the title indicates, the famous goddess Astarte across the centuries in the Bronze Age. I want to share some bits that stood out to me, and that I think that more people should know:
- Most people “know” Astarte as a goddess of love and war, usually framed as the Near Eastern blueprint for Aphrodite, whose war aspect was supposedly scrubbed out when she reached Greece because of misogyny. (And by “most people,” I mostly mean Overly Sarcastic Productions and their viewers.)
The problem is that this isn’t actually true.
First of all, the neat Ishtar → Astarte → Aphrodite lineage is heavily disputed. I’m planning to read Stephanie Lynn Budin’s The Origin of Aphrodite to get even deeper into the scholarship, but even at a basic level, the comparison starts to fall apart once you look at who Astarte actually was. She doesn’t line up very well with Aphrodite at all.
More importantly, Astarte was not a goddess of sex, love, marriage, or reproduction in the way Aphrodite was. As Rüdiger Schmitt puts it, she was “not a fertility goddess, but rather a goddess of war, apotropaic magic, and kingship” (p. 10 of Athtart). Treating her as a flattened “love-and-war Aphrodite prototype” does a disservice to both goddesses, and seriously distorts the ancient evidence.
- Should we even call her Astarte? Her Ugaritic name was Athtart, and in Phoenicia it was Ashtart; Astarte is simply the romanized version of her name. In recent years, translators have largely abandoned the custom of using Roman names for Greek gods. I remember reading the Iliad, Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and similar works in high school and having to buy editions that referred to Jupiter, Minerva, and Ulysses—a practice that has thankfully fallen out of use. So why don’t we extend the same courtesy to Canaanite gods?
- In a complete shift of tone, here’s my favorite art of her:
- Her relationship with her sister Anat is genuinely fascinating. They’re siblings (daughters of El in Ugaritic religion, Ptah in Egyptian), and their bond is oddly beautiful. Despite both being war goddesses, they’re not teaming up for carnage—instead they’re healing poisonous bites, curing their dad’s hangover, and hyping up Baal. Soft, supportive lethal sisters 🫂
- Is Baal her husband? At least in the bronze age, the author argues that no, we have no reason to believe that Astarte was considered Baal’s consort. We have a text where Astart is hunting on a steppe and Baal seems to desire her (KTU 1.92), Astart has the epithets ‘of the temple of Baal’ and ‘name of Baal’, and in the Baal Cycle she helps him defeat Yamm (though she’s not his biggest supporter, that would be Anat) — however, none of those texts indicate that they are man and wife. They only proof for that kind of connection comes “from a neo-Punic building inscription from Mididi in Tunisia: "The sanctuary built for Ashtart, wife of Baal; the citizens of Mididi built (it)"” (p. 137). My personal conclusion is that it’s best to describe Baal and Astart’s bond as a situationship 🫣
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Persephone choosing to stay with Hades: The Sources
Here are all of the ancient texts that I could find where the goddess Persephone decides to spend the entire year with her husband. If you know of a source that I’m missing, please let me know!
"[...] though Greece might marvel at the Elysian fields, and Proserpine, re-won, might not care to follow her mother [...]"
- Georgica, Virgil (C1st B.C, Roman)
"I shall speak aloud about that food which confines Proserpine beneath the vast weight of earth above, by what compact she loves the gloomy king of darkness, [...]"
"and you, ruler of the world below, a god whom lingering Death torments through long centuries; and Styx, and that Elysium no Thessalian witch deserves; and Persephone who shuns her mother in heaven; [...]"
- Pharsalia, Lucan (C1st A.D, Roman)
“[…] And ye in Sicily who plucked the flowers
Upon Halaesus’ banks, when Ceres' child
Gazed on your dances and the lilies plucked
That bloomed on Henna's plain and, borne away
By Lethe's tyrant-king, became his bride,
Preferring gloomy shades to stars, and Dis to Jove,
And Tartarus to heaven and death's abode
To life, and in realms below she reigns
The Queen Proserpina.”
- De re rustica, Columella (C1st A.D, Roman)
“ABANDONED CERES: Is it from the priest, who is introduced as having died in the sixth [book], as in 'and Polyboetes, sacred to Ceres'? Or is 'desertae' (abandoned) due to the time of war, because of the ten-year siege? Or is 'desertae' because of her daughter, as in 'nor does Proserpina, sought again, care to follow her mother'?”
- Commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid, Servius (C4th A.D, Roman) [Emphasis mine]
Source for this list: Radcliffe (2013). Redefining Ancient Orphism A Study in Greek Religion. Cambridge University Press.
Further reading on Persephone and Hades’ relationship being seen as consensual
one thing I think is worth noting is all these sources address Proserpine who is of Roman mythology and not Greek. Many of the Roman Gods are heavily inspired of the Greeks but they are not the same despite often being conflated.
So personally I think its not entirely accurate to associate these sources directly with Persephone especially when all the Greek sources (at least, that I've read or heard discussed) are very specific in the goddesses being unwillingly and cursed.
Anyhow, this is still an incredibly interesting study and the further reading link sadly isn't working for me. I wonder if these are the origin of most modern day Persephone retellings?
I am well aware of that. Also, I beg Greek myth fans to start talking about “Roman religion” and “Greek religion” rather than “Roman mythology” and “Greek mythology” when they refer to the gods; they deities, not tales.
First, those texts are a minority. The idea of Persephone (I’ll use the standard spelling here for simplicity; we can get rigorous and start calling her Persephoneia in the Homeric epics, Pherepapha on Attic vases, Pherepapha in Plato, etc., but is that really necessary? Not even scholars are this inflexible) being abducted was a mainstay of Roman cult, art, and poetry, much as it was in Greece. These texts are oddities, that’s why I posted them.
As you can see, all of these excerpts also describe Persephone as being abducted—and pretty unsubtly, too—while simply adding that she later decided to remain in Hades. This isn’t unique to Roman authors: Apollodorus depicts Persephone as residing in the underworld year-round in his Adonis myth, albeit not explicitly.
Proserpina was not a pre-existing Latin goddess later syncretized with Persephone; rather, she represents a Latinized form of Persephone herself. The Romans even imported Greek priestesses to instruct them in her cult, as noted by Barbette Spaeth in her book ‘The Roman Goddess Ceres’:
“The evidence indicates that the Roman cult of Ceres and Proserpina had a Greek origin and was related to the Thesmophoric cult of the goddess Demeter. Cicero identifies the origins of the cult in his speech on behalf of L. Cornelius Balbus:
Jurors, our forefathers wished the sacra Cereris to be performed with the greatest religious scrupulousness and reverence; these, since they were brought over from Greece, were both taken care of always by Greek priestesses and were named altogether Greek. But although they selected from Greece that woman, who was to show and conduct that Greek rite, nevertheless they wanted her to perform the rites as a citizen on behalf of citizens, so that she might pray to the immortal gods with a foreign and external knowledge, but with a domestic and civil intention. I see that these priestesses generally were either from Naples or Velia, without a doubt [women] of federated cities.
(Cic. Balb. 55)
According to Cicero, the rites of the Roman cult of Ceres, the sacra Cereris, were “brought over from Greece” (adsumpta de Graecia).² The word “Graecia” could refer either to Greece proper or to Magna Graecia, the Greek cities in Southern Italy. Cicero suggests the latter, since he goes on to tell us that the priestesses of this cult came from Naples or Velia. Southern Italy, particularly Campania, was a region particularly devoted to the worship of Demeter Thesmophoros and her daughter, Persephone. As Peterson has shown, this cult had its center at Cumae, whence it spread to Naples and the other cities of Southern Italy.³ The Greek cult of Demeter Thesmophoros was particularly associated with women.⁴ Its primary festival was the Thesmophoria, in which women alone participated, and the officiants of this cult were exclusively female. As we shall see, the Roman cult of Ceres and Proserpina shared the close relationship to women of its Greek model.”
You can’t draw a line in the sand and neatly separate Persephone and Proserpina as different entities. Polytheistic religions are more complex than that.
There are plenty of legitimate complaints about Greek mythology retellings but then some are genuinely just "This author has used a less popular version of a myth for their story which means they are wrong and stupid" or "There is a single valid interpretation of this story/figure/relationship (mine, of course!) and this author has interpreted it differently which means they are wrong and stupid". It's tiring.
Yes !!! The book The Origins of Aphrodite even goes as far as to argue that, archeologically, it’s possible that Hermes was Aphrodite’s first ever consort in Greece!
(I was going to post screenshots of several pages of text here, but that’s a drag, so) TLDR: The site of Kato Symi in Crete is the oldest cult of Aphrodite in Greece, as shown by the archeological evidence. The religious activity there dates back to the Middle Minoan period, and we can identify Aphrodite and Hermes as the deities worshipped there from the 6th century B.C onwards. There are 2 theories: Aphrodite and Hermes were worshipped there continually since its inception, or the cult initially worshipped 2 Minoan deities that were replaced by Aphrodite and Hermes. The second one seems more likely, but the site is so old that depending on when the “switch” happened, it is possible that Hermes was Aphrodite’s very first Greek god consort!
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My first instinct is to say no because "identical" = monozygotic twins are almost invariably (barring exceedingly rare instances of chromosomal abnormalities) same sex pairs, but well, this is Greek mythology we're talking about. There is a lot of genetically impossible stuff going on.
I'll still go with no though. Fraternal twins can resemble each other greatly, too.
“Literary accounts of Medusa’s death generally conform to the pattern of the mythical abduction, and the connection was already several centuries old by the time the images I have discussed above were produced. The elements of the mythical abduction are firmly in place in Hesiod’s Theogony (270–281), where we are told that the Gorgons, daughters of Phorkys and Keto, live together in the borderlands between Ocean and Night. Two of the sisters, Sthenno and Euryale, are immortal and ageless, but Medusa is mortal, and she alone of the three “suffers a grievous fate” (λυγρὰ παθοῦσα, 276). She couples with Poseidon in a soft meadow among the spring flowers (ἐν μαλακῷ λειμῶνι καὶ ἄνθεσιν εἰαρινοῖσιν, 279), and when Perseus cuts off her head, Pegasos and Chrysaor—the children of her union with Poseidon—spring forth.
Several details in this account suggest an affinity with the paradigm of the mythical abduction. Though smaller than most of the groups treated by Calame,³¹ the Gorgons are a group of sisters born in the same generation (and thus contemporary with each other in age), who share a collective name (Γοργόνες, 274) and live together. Of the three sisters, one is distinguished as exceptional, and she alone becomes the object of male attention. What is remarkable about this account is that the poet says nothing of either the physical appearance of the Gorgons or the dangers involved in looking at them—although he does not hesitate, some 15 lines later, to describe the monstrous Echidna in vivid detail (295–305). The Gorgons of the Theogony are simply three sisters, two of whom are immortal; the mortal one couples with Poseidon, is killed by Perseus, and through her death gives birth to Pegasos and Chrysaor. In fact, the only physical monstrosity that can be ascribed to Hesiod’s Medusa is her unusual way of giving birth.
The most significant difference between Medusa’s story and more traditional accounts of abducted maidens is its preoccupation with mortality, for Perseus does not rape or marry Medusa, but kills her. Still, we do not have to look far to find that the connection between death and marriage was strong in Greek thought. Perhaps the most apt comparison for our purposes is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, in which Persephone’s seizure by the lord of the Underworld is equal parts death and rape.³² Medusa, too, is raped by a god before the arrival of Perseus, and Vernant has noted the parallel between the flowery meadow (ἐν μαλακῷ λειμῶνι καὶ ἄνθεσιν εἰαρινοῖσιν, Hes. Theog. 279) that serves as the setting for that event and the soft meadow (λειμῶν’ … μαλακόν, Hom. Hymn Dem. 7) where Hades finds Persephone and her companions gathering flowers.³³ Despite its emphasis on mortality, Hesiod’s account of the Gorgons contains a strong sexual element, and even Medusa’s death resembles marriage in the sense that both produce children.
As the earliest surviving description of Medusa’s death, the account in the Theogony attests to the antiquity of the Gorgon’s association with the maiden who is raped by a god or hero. It also shows us that even in this early period, her death was figured as a perversion of the erotic abduction. Her fame rested on her mortality rather than her beauty; her fate, likewise, was a death that produced prodigious offspring. Subsequent accounts, both literary and visual, distorted the paradigm further: the maidens became hideous monsters deadly to behold, and Perseus turned from pursuer to pursued when he was forced to flee the dead Medusa’s sisters. Despite their effect on individual elements of the story, these reversals did not violate its basic framework, which remained consistent with the paradigm of the maiden taken from a circle of her peers, as I hope the following examples will show.³⁴
If we consider that the practice of distinguishing the abducted girl from the others in her group may explain why Medusa sometimes appears physically different from her sisters in vase painting, we can begin to see evidence for the pattern in the early visual record. On the famous Proto-Attic neck amphora in Eleusis, all the Gorgons appear as monsters, but Medusa is much larger than her sisters and has a rounder torso.³⁵ Similar distinctions can occur when the Gorgons are beautiful maidens: although both Gorgons on a mid-5th-century white-ground pyxis in Paris have human faces, the Gorgon on the left (usually identified as Medusa, probably because of her proximity to Perseus), has a round, upturned nose, in contrast with her sister’s straighter nose, and their chitoneskoi differ in color.³⁶
The vase painters were not alone among their contemporaries in emphasizing Medusa’s affinities with the abducted maiden. In Pindar’s account of Perseus’s victory in the Twelfth Pythian Ode (6–17), the parallels with the traditional erotic abduction are striking. Here Pindar specifies that the Gorgons are maidens (παρθένοις, 9), and while noting the forbidding appearance of the two sisters (παρθένοις … ἀπλάτοις ὀφίων κεφαλαῖς, 9), he singles out Medusa for her beauty (εὐπαρόου … Μεδοίσας, 16). His focus on the Gorgons’ dirge (θρῆνον, 8) for their dead sister strengthens the connection to maiden choruses: the threnos typically consisted of a monodic performance with choral accompaniment, and in Pindar’s account of Medusa’s death, the sisters’ dirge accompanies Perseus’s shout (ᾖξεν, 11). Since the story of Medusa’s death plays upon the theme of the maiden’s abduction, moreover, we might even understand the threnos sung by Medusa’s sisters as a replacement for the epithalamium they would have sung if her story had adhered to the traditional pattern of abduction for marriage.³⁷
Pindar’s definition of Medusa as an object of erotic desire corresponds to a larger pattern in epinician poetry that Timothy Power has recently explored with reference to Bacchylides 13. In this ode, the maiden choregos appears as a leaping, carefree fawn (ἥυτε νεβρὸς ἀπενθής … θροΐσκουσα, 87, 90) dancing with her companions in a flowery landscape (ἀνθεμόεντας, ἐντ[’ οὐχ]οῦς, 88).³⁸ Power argues that the ode presents the choregos as an idealized marriage partner for the victor, and that their union has an analogue in one of the heroic labors narrated in the poem: “I propose that Herakles’ subjugation of a person of hubris hypsinoos, figured as the defeat of the Nemean lion, in the ode’s first myth narrative (44–49) is a model for the victor’s subjugation and acculturation (through marriage) of the hypsauches (84) choregos, who is figured as a wild fawn. Indeed, the sexualized acculturation of ‘wild women’ (or women guarded by antisocial wild men) by god or hero is a fairly common theme in the epinikia.”³⁹ Power goes on to list Pelops and Hippodameia (Pind. Ol. 1) and Apollo and Cyrene (Pind. Pyth. 9) as examples of such pairings, and to his list I would add Perseus and Medusa in Pythian 12. Equal parts maiden and beast,⁴⁰ Medusa is the perfect wild woman for the epinician hero to subdue, and it seems to be in keeping with this tradition of erotic subjugation in the epinikia that Pindar has emphasized her maidenly beauty.”
- “Perseus, The Maiden Medusa, and the Imagery of Abduction” by Hesperia 76 for The American School of Classical Studies at Athens (2007)
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Further reading: Zolotnikova, Olga A. “A Hideous Monster or a Beautiful Maiden?: Did the Western Greeks Alter the Concept of Gorgon?” In Philosopher Kings and Tragic Heroes: Essays on Images and Ideas from Western Greece, edited by Heather L. Reid and Davide Tanasi, 1:353–70. Parnassos Press – Fonte Aretusa, 2016. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvbj7gjn.23.
And you, Liber from thyrsus-bearing India— forever a youth with locks unshorn, controlling your tigers with a vine-clad spear and binding your horn-bearing head in a turban— you cannot outdo Hippolytus’ firm locks. Lest you admire your own face too much, the story has spread through every nation whom Phaedra’s sister preferred to Bromius.
-Seneca, Phaedra, 753-760. The chorus speaking on Hippolytus' beauty he inherited from his father.
A small part that stood out. There was a tradition where Ariadne ditched Dionysus (Bromius was his epithet) for Theseus, and this is one of the rare ones that explicitly mentioned it besides seemingly in Hyginus (Astronomica 2.5.1) This is interesting because around this period the familiar version where Theseus willfully abandoned Ariadne became popular.
There's something vaguely funny how, when reading papers touching on Helen and Menelaos' scenes in the Odyssey, the interpretation of the marital relationship can vary so wildly.
It goes from anywhere between "marital bliss" to "obviously tense and questionable reconciliation". So different readings from the same thing!
And like, I can definitely see both ends of these very disparate interpretations.
Helen seems relaxed, she and Menelaos to all appearances amicable as they speak with each other, she walks around the palace/comes down into the hall as she wishes, they sleep together, etc.
And yet, also; she just single-handedly decides to drug both her husband and her guests, no apparent warning or question about it. Her and Menelaos' Trojan tales are distinctly at odds with how Helen and her actions are shown. Menelaos comes after Helen, he chooses a story that immediately questions and problematizes Helen's proclaimed feelings and motives in her story.
And when you put that in conjunction with what seems to have been the mainstream version of the reclamation of Helen, that is, that Menelaos attempted to kill her but Aphrodite had to intervene... Well, I don't think it's impossible or improbable that they actually have truly reconciled and are back at a good spot in their relationship, ten years after the sack and having spent nothing but time together for eight of those years as they travelled.
But still. I could also equally see it the other way, given the very insistent general tradition that Helen left of her own will/desire, and an attempted murder might be hard to forgive. So the ambiguity in the Sparta scenes is really interesting.
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it's not so much that a cyclops is monstrous because a one-eyed giant who eats people must be a monster; it's that anyone who does not follow your laws, your customs, your culture must be a monster.
polyphemus eats his guests not because he's a cannibal — cannibalism also being a taboo that applies to humans, and he's not human — but because he doesn't follow xenia. polyphemus says to odysseus "we don't respect zeus here," but odysseus approaches polyphemus as if polyphemus is the foreigner. he expects his customs (which serve him, a conquering hero) to take precedence, even though he is the one away from home. he's been away from home for over ten years.
because to odysseus, there's not much difference between the trojans (the city he's sacked) or the cicones (a people he raided on the way home) and polyphemus, right? except that polyphemus is able to turn the tables. he is a monster, not in the sense that he is not a human being — the trojans have not been treated as human beings — but because he can insist that his law be respected in his own home.
and it's not that odysseus can't adapt. look at how differently he approaches nausicaa, or even circe. but his perspective is what we wayfind by, and all the while odysseus, at troy and during the wanderings, is himself foreign.
and then he comes to phaeacia and weeps over songs of war. and then he comes home and doesn't recognize it. and then divine intervention both hides him from and reveals him to his son and wife. and then he has to conquer his own homeland. and then the poem ends, abrupt and final journey spoken of but unresolved. and each of these things makes his perspective strange to himself, and by extension to us. it is exactly at the moment odysseus comes home that he believes himself to be lost, foreign, for good.
who else up thinking about how the "helen never wanted to be in troy in any version of the story or at any time ever" rhetorical position, rather than complicating misogynistic views of the notoriously self-contradictory helen of ancient sources, has been turned to the service of rehabilitating menelaus' image instead
