Deity · Canaanite · c. 1400 BCE
Astarte
Also called Athtart, Ashtoreth, Astarté · also recorded as Ashtaroth, ʿAṯtart, 𒀾𒁯𒋫, 𒀭𒀸𒁯𒊏𒀜, 𒅖𒁯𒋫, 𐎓𐎘𐎚𐎗𐎚, 𐤏𐤔𐤕𐤓𐤕 (per Wikidata)
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.
Well sourced
Astarte's biblical form, *Ashtoreth*, has the consonants of the goddess with the vowels of *bosheth*, 'shame', deliberately inserted — the same insult technique applied to Baal-Zebul. Christian demonology inherited the deformed name and produced Astaroth, a male duke of hell riding a dragon. The transformation from a major goddess of two civilisations into a mid-ranking male demon is the tradition's most complete act of erasure, and it is entirely legible in the name.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
What the name means
West Semitic *Athtart*, cognate with Akkadian *Ishtar*. The biblical *Ashtoreth* is the consonants of her name with the vowels of *bosheth*, 'shame', deliberately substituted.
Where it was actually worshipped
Sidon, Tyre, Byblos, Cyprus; later identified with Aphrodite at Paphos.
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
- Named there as
- Athtart
- Rank
- Goddess of Love and War
- Pantheon
- Canaanite
- Order
- Ugaritic pantheon
- Base of operations
- Sidon, Tyre, Byblos, Cyprus; later identified with Aphrodite at Paphos.
- Era
- c. 1400 BCE
- Traditions
- Canaanite & Ugaritic, Mesopotamian
Traits
- Domain
- Love, war, the evening star
- Traditional form
- An armed woman, or a lion-mounted figure
- Metal of its planet (Agrippa, 1533)
- Silver and brass — “Amongst Metals, Silver, and Brass, both yellow, and red.” (I.28)
- Planet
- Venus
4 sites
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 Saida
33.562, 35.373 · Pleiades 678393
now es-Sur
33.269, 35.202 · Pleiades 678437
now Jebeil
34.119, 35.646 · Pleiades 668216
now Kato Paphos
Where the Levantine goddess was received as Aphrodite.
Where she is received as Aphrodite.
34.757, 32.407 · Pleiades 707586
2 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 2 offices attributed to Astarte, 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.
- social1
- martial1
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 Astarte, 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 Athtart, Ashtoreth
- Rank: given as Goddess; Abomination of the Zidonians
Aids Baal against Yam; a goddess of the hunt and of battle.
Named among the foreign gods Solomon is condemned for following.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Identified with Ishtar
Cognate West Semitic and East Semitic forms of the same Venus goddess.
Ancestor of Astaroth
Ashtoreth — the goddess's consonants with the vowels of bosheth, 'shame' — becomes a male duke of hell.
Identified with Freyja
Love and war held together in one goddess.
Identified with Hathor
Love and music, and a warlike aspect held in the same goddess.
Served by Jezebel
The Asherah her prophets serve is of the same West Semitic goddess complex.
Identified with Asherah
Distinct goddesses at Ugarit, steadily conflated in the biblical text and in everything downstream of it.
Identified with The Queen of Heaven
One of the three usual candidates for the title, with Ishtar and Asherah.
Afterwards
What did later readers make of it?
Became the male Goetic duke Astaroth, riding a dragon. The most complete erasure in the compendium: a major goddess of two civilisations turned into a mid-ranking male demon, with the change visible in the vowels.
Kept in its own section on purpose. Everything above is what the cited texts say; this is what was built on top of them afterwards, and blending the two is how most popular demonology goes wrong.
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Astarte?
Is Astarte the same as Ishtar?
What rank is Astarte?
How else is Astarte spelled?
What is Astarte said to do?
How old is Astarte?
Nearest in the corpus
If Astarte 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.
Anat
Warrior Goddess · Canaanite
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.
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 Astarte
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.