ʿAṯtar is an ancient Semitic deity whose role, name, and even gender varied across the cultures of West Asia. In both genders, ʿAṯtar is identified with the planet Venus, the morning and evening star, in some manifestations of Semitic mythology.

Name
The name appears in various Semitic languages as: 
 the feminine form  () in Akkadian;
 the masculine form  () in Arabic;
 and the masculine form  () in Ethiosemitic.

Attestations

Among Amorites

At Ugarit

The Ugaritic masculine variant of ʿAṯtar,  (), appears in the Baʿal Cycle.

The Northwest Semitic feminine form of ʿAṯtar, the Great Goddess  (), is often mentioned in Ugaritic ritual texts, but played a minor role in mythological texts.

Among Aramaeans
Among the Aramaeans, ʿAṯtar appears in a masculine form as the god  (), in which capacity he was identified with the baetyl as  (, ).

Within the ancient Aramaean religion, the deceased ancestors of the clans, called , were worshipped as idealised figures who could become assimilated to ʿAttar, as evidenced by personal names such as   (, ), and  and  (, ).

The use of the name of the god ʿAttar as a theophoric element is attested in the name  (, ), which is attested on an 8th-century BC stamp seal and was also the name of the earliest known ruler of Laqē, as well as  (, ), which was the name of two rulers of the kingdom of Bēt-Gūš. The name of this god always appears in the masculine form even in women's names, such as ʿAttar-ramat and ʿAttar-ṭabat, thus attesting that the Aramaean ʿAttar was a distinctly masculine deity.

One of the hypostases of the Aramaean ʿAttar was  (), that is the ʿAttar of the Heavens: in this role, ʿAttar was the incarnation of the sky's procreative power in the form of the moisture provided by rain, which made fertile his consort, the goddess of the Earth which has been dried up by the summer heat. Due to ʿAttar's role as a provider of rain, his epithet "of the Heavens" refers to his manifestation as lightning and thunder in the skies.

The name of the goddess who was the consort of ʿAttar is itself not attested in Aramaic, but is recorded in Sabaic as  () or  (), which was derived from the South Semitic root  (), itself a declension of the Semitic root , meaning "to be dry." The position of Hūbis/Huwbis as the consort of ʿAttar-Šamayin is attested by the depiction of a goddess in front of a standing worshipper on an 8th-century Aramaean cylinder seal, with the image of a vulva, the symbol of Hūbis/Huwbis, being present behind the goddess and over a recumbent gazelle - the sacred animal of ʿAttar - over which was also inscribed the name of the god himself.

The earliest record of ʿAttar-Šamayin is from an Aramaic inscription on the 8th-century BC cylinder seal belonging to an individual named , who is described in the inscription as a  (. ); Barruq's own name, which means "thunder," was a reference to ʿAttar-Šamayin in his role as a god associated with thunder and lightning..

In South Arabia
Among the ancient South Arabians,  () was a masculine deity who had retained the prominence of his role as the deity of the planet Venus as the Morning Star, and was a god presiding over thunderstorms and who provided natural irrigation as rain. ʿAṯtar thus held a very important place within the ancient South Arabian pantheon, in which he replaced the old Semitic high god ʾIl as the supreme deity.

The name of ʿAṯtar was suffixed with a mimation in the South Arabian kingdom of Ḥaḍramawt, thus giving the Ḥaḑramitic form  ().

Within South Arabian polytheism, ʿAṯtar held a supreme position within the cosmology of the ancient South Arabians as the god presiding over the whole world, always appeared first in lists, and had various manifestations with their own epithets. The rulers of the ancient South Arabian states would offer ritual banquets in honour of ʿAṯtar, with the banquet being paid for from the tithe offered to the god by the populace.

The patron deity of the Qatabānians, however, was the Moon-god, variously called  (, in Qatabān) or  (, in Ḥaḍramawt), who was seen as being closer to the people compared to the more distant figure of ʿAṯtar, and the people of these states consequently called themselves the children of their respective Moon-god.

The hunter god 
The South Arabian ʿAṯtar was a hunter god, and the ancient South Arabians performed ritual hunts in his honour as fertility rites with the goal of making the rain fall. The chosen prey during these hunts were probably gazelles, which were sacred to ʿAṯtar.

This hunter aspect of ʿAṯtar is also present in his Northwest Semitic feminine variant, who is called  (, ) in one passage of an Ugaritic text. The Sabaic hallowed phrase  (, ) itself had a parallel in a reference to  (, ) in a text from Emar.

One of the hypostases of the South Arabian ʿAṯtar was  (), whose name, which was a -pattern Semitic word formation meaning "rainfall," was related to Geʽez  (), Amharic  (), Tigrē  (), and Eastern Gurage  (), all meaning "rainy season." Kirrūm was thus a form of ʿAṯtar who provided fertility in the form of the rain he dispensed.

The Babylonians identified Kirrūm, under the name  (), with their own goddess  (), who was herself the goddess of the planet Venus as well as the Mesopotamian feminine form of ʿAṯtar.

Another hypostasis of the South Arabian ʿAṯtar was  (), that is ʿAṯtar of the East, who was invoked especially in curses as an avenger god against enemies.

Among Arabs
ʿAṯtar was worshipped as a masculine deity among the ancient Arabs, who during the Iron Age were located principally in the Syrian Desert and North Arabia.

Similarly to the link between ʿAttar and the ancestral cult of the  among the Aramaeans, there also existed a connection between ʿAttar and the cult of the ancestors among Arabs which is attested from as early as the 7th century BC in the form of a personal name recorded in Akkadian as  (), from an original Ancient North Arabian form , in which the divine patron of a clan or tribe, the  (, of which  is the -type broken plural), is assimilated to ʿAttar.

One 8th century BC Aramaic inscription found in a tomb in a region of the Zagros Mountains close to a Mannaean royal tomb mentions ʿAttar as  (), that is a variant of ʿAttar whose epithet was the Old Arabic plural form of  (), , with ʿAttar-Muṣurūn thus being ʿAttar of the Marches. The name "the Marches" itself was the designation assigned by the Mesopotamians to the northern Ḥijāz and the Negev. The name of the deity is followed by the title  (), corresponding to Ancient North Arabian  () and Ethiosemitic  (), and meaning "the ruler."

ʿAttar-Muṣurūn was thus the main deity of North Arabia, and the tomb in which his name was found inscribed likely belonged to an Arab who had been deported by the Assyrians to their northeastern border regions.

In Qedar

The Qedarite Arabs worshipped ʿAṯtar in his form of , whose name is attested in Ancient North Arabian as  (). Assyrian records mention this god, referred to in Akkadian as  (, reflecting the Aramaic form  rather than the Ancient North Arabian ), as one of the Qedarite deities whose idols were captured as war booty by the Neo-Assyrian king Sîn-ahhī-erība and was returned to the Qedarites by his son and successor Aššur-aḫa-iddina.

The worship of ʿAṯtar in his form of  was also practised by the Qedarites, as attested by an inscription of the Neo-Assyrian king Aššur-aḫa-iddina mentioning this deity in Akkadian as  (), with the dissimilation of the epithet  into  reflecting the influence of Akkadian  () and Aramaic  (), meaning "priest."

In Palmyra

At Palmyra,  where lived a large Arab population, the Arab ʿAṯtar was assimilated with the Arameo-Canaanite great god, Baʿal, in the form of , later  (), that is Baʿal-ʿAṯtar.

In Canaan
The masculine form  () existed among the Canaanite peoples as an astral deity, which is attested by his mention along with the Moon-God Šaggar in the 9th or 7th century BC Dayr ʿAllā inscription, the subject of which is largely the Sun-goddess Šamāš, thus forming a triad of the Sun, Moon, and Venus similarly to the one attested in South Arabia, and suggesting a South Arabian religious influence in Moab. The hypostases of ʿAṯtar who appear among the various Canaanite peoples might have been an indigenous Transjordanian variation of his or local adaptations of the North Arabian variant of the god.

In Phoenicia

A possible Phoenician variant of  might be attested as a theophoric element  () in a personal name from Byblos,  ().

In the 5th century BC, under the Achaemenid Empire, a shrine dedicated to  existed in the Sharon Plain in Canaan, at a location corresponding to the present-day Israeli town of Elyakhin, where he was worshipped by Phoenicians, Aramaeans, and Arabs.

Arabian units of the Achaemenid army stationed in Canaan during the 5th century BC who participated in the cult of  have left inscriptions recording his name, suffixed with a mimation to differentiate him from the Canaanite feminine form of ʿAṯtar,  (), in the Phoenician and Aramaic scripts as  and  (). This form of the god's name was distinctly North Arabian, showing that the worshippers who had left these inscriptions were originally from North Arabia, possibly from Taymāʿ or Dadān.

In Moab

ʿAštar was attested among the Canaanite people of the Moabites during the 9th century BC, when he was identified with the patron god of Moab,  (), in the form of  ().

According to the inscription of the Moabite king Mōšaʿ on the victory stele commemorating his triumph in a war against the Israelites, he had sacrificed the whole population of the town of Nebo to ʿAštar-Kamōš. This was likely due to the influence of the South Arabian ʿAṯtar-Šariqān, that is of ʿAštar's hypostasis as an avenger deity who was invoked in curses against enemies.

Legacy

In popular culture
ʿAštar appears as the demon Ashtar in the video game Shin Megami Tensei II.

See also
 Venus in culture

References

Sources

 
.

 
 
 
 

 
 

Axumite gods
West Semitic gods
Sky and weather gods
Stellar gods
Fertility gods
Venusian deities
Inanna
War gods
South Arabia
Ugaritic deities
Phoenician mythology