Deity · Canaanite · c. 1400 BCE
Anat
Also called Anath, Anatu
Baal's sister and avenger. She grinds Death himself to pieces and sows him in a field, which makes her the most violent figure in the Ugaritic corpus.
Well sourced
Anat is the reason the Baal Cycle cannot be read as a tidy myth of seasonal renewal. When Baal is swallowed by Mot she recovers the body herself, and then does to Death what is done to grain: seizes him, splits him with a blade, winnows him, parches him in fire, grinds him in a mill and sows him across a field. The scene is agricultural in its verbs and appalling in its object, and it is she who performs it rather than Baal. Her afterlife in the Hebrew Bible is the opposite of that violence — the name survives only in Shamgar son of Anath, the town of Beth-Anath and the village of Anathoth, with no cult described and no goddess remembered.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
Where it was actually worshipped
Ugarit above all. Egypt then adopted her: Ramesses II kept a temple of Anat at Pi-Ramesses, named a daughter Bint-Anath, and had her carved beside him as his shield.
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- The Baal Cycle (Ugaritic Tablets) · c. 1400-1200 BCE
- Rank
- Warrior Goddess
- Pantheon
- Canaanite
- Order
- Canaanite pantheon
- Base of operations
- Ugarit above all. Egypt then adopted her: Ramesses II kept a temple of Anat at Pi-Ramesses, named a daughter Bint-Anath, and had her carved beside him as his shield.
- Era
- c. 1400 BCE
- Traditions
- Canaanite & Ugaritic
Traits
- Domain
- War, the hunt, vengeance for Baal
- Traditional form
- Armed, wading in blood to the knees
Stats
Known connections
Identified with
1 site
Where was it worshipped?
Attested cult sites, located against the Pleiades gazetteer of the ancient world where it reaches and against Wikidata everywhere else. An absence here is not evidence that no cult existed: a good number of figures never had one, and the entry above says so where that is the case.
now Qantir
The Hyksos capital, where Set was identified with the Levantine storm god.
Pi-Ramesses, where Ramesses II kept a temple of Anat and named a daughter Bint-Anath. The same site Set holds, and for the same reason: this is where Egypt took Levantine gods in.
30.786, 31.823 · Pleiades 727080
4 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 4 offices attributed to Anat, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- martial2
- transformation1
- malefic1
2 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 2 texts that names Anat, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
2 texts spanning roughly 900 years
Where the texts differ
- Name: given as Anat, Anath
Slaughters in the valley, recovers Baal's body, and destroys Mot by winnowing, grinding and sowing him.
Present only as a name, and the corpus records that rather than dressing it up. No cult of Anat is described anywhere in the Hebrew Bible; what survives is Shamgar son of Anath in Judges 3:31 and 5:6, the town of Beth-Anath in Joshua 19:38, and Anathoth, the village Jeremiah came from. A goddess reduced to a place on a map and a man's patronymic is a different kind of afterlife from Leviathan's, and it is the more common one.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Identified with Athena
Two armed maiden goddesses, matched by later commentators. Recorded by Wikidata (P460); not asserted by a text this corpus carries.
Identified with Isis
Goddesses who recover and restore a slain male god.
Identified with The Morrígan
War goddesses present at the slaughter itself rather than directing it from outside.
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Anat?
Is Anat the same as Athena?
What rank is Anat?
How else is Anat spelled?
What is Anat said to do?
How old is Anat?
Nearest in the corpus
If Anat is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Astarte
Goddess of Love and War · Canaanite
The West Semitic goddess of love and war, cognate with Ishtar — and the direct ancestor of the Goetic duke Astaroth, who kept the name and lost the gender.
Baal Hadad
Storm God · Canaanite
The Canaanite storm and fertility god who defeats Sea and Death — and whose title, *baal* ('lord'), the Hebrew Bible turns into a generic term for false gods.
Chemosh
God of Moab · Canaanite
National god of Moab, known from the Bible and from the Mesha Stele — where a Moabite king describes his own history in language almost identical to Israel's.
El
Father of the Gods · Canaanite
The aged high god who presides over the assembly at Ugarit — and whose name is one of the Hebrew Bible's own words for God.
Lotan
Chaos Serpent · Canaanite
The seven-headed sea-serpent slain in the Baal Cycle, described in language Isaiah reuses almost verbatim for Leviathan.
Mot
God of Death · Canaanite
Death itself as a god, with a throat wide enough to swallow Baal. The later mouth-of-hell is this image, several cultures downstream.
The books behind Anat
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
The Baal Cycle (Ugaritic Tablets)
Anonymous; recovered at Ras Shamra · c. 1400-1200 BCE · Ugaritic
Read The Baal Cycle (Ugaritic Tablets) in full ↗Cover: CC BY-SA 3.0 · Unknown artist · Wikimedia file page
Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon
Various · c. 900–100 BCE · Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek
Read Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon in full ↗Cover: Public domain · see en:Aleppo Codex; scanned by · Wikimedia file page
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.