Athtar

Summary

Athtar is a god of the Ugarit tablets, whose name is written ʿṯtr. Add the feminine -t to his name and it becomes Astarte. Among the ancient South Arabians he was one of the great gods, invoked in inscriptions on dams and channels that watered palm groves, and most scholars think his name first named the planet Venus, the morning star.

His fullest story is in the sixth tablet of the Baal Cycle. Baal has died, Anat has buried him on Mount Saphon with the help of Shapsh, and she goes to El at the source of the rivers, bows at his feet and says: let Athirat and her sons rejoice now, for mighty Baal is dead. El calls to Athirat: give me one of your sons, and I will make him king. She answers: shall we not make king one who has knowledge and wit? Then she says: let us make Athtar the Brilliant king; let Athtar rule. Athtar goes up to the heights of Saphon and sits on Baal's throne; his feet do not reach the footstool and his head does not reach the top of the throne. Athtar says: I will not rule in the heights of Saphon. He comes down from Baal's throne and rules in the earth, god of all of it, and the text then mentions water drawn from jars.

Earlier, in the second tablet, when El orders a palace to be built for Yamm the Sea, Athtar raises his voice against it. Shapsh tells him: Bull El your father has favoured Prince Yamm; how will he listen to you? He will pull up the supports of your seat, overturn the throne of your kingship and break the sceptre of your rule. Athtar answers: I have no house like the gods, no dwelling like the sons of the Holy One. Shall I rule, or shall I not rule? And he is told: because you have no wife as the gods have.

The idea Athtar's stories turn on is that he reaches for the throne and finds it bigger than himself. He fights no one and no one defeats him; he is measured against the throne. Once the throne goes to Yamm, who is to have a palace, while Athtar has neither house nor wife; once he sits on Baal's throne and his feet do not reach the footstool. Then he comes down and rules the earth. Wyatt reads this descent as the pattern of human kingship, which receives its authority from the gods above and returns to the earth to govern it. Others, among them Gaster and de Moor, read Athtar as the god of the water that waters the crops when Baal's rain is gone in summer; Wyatt rejects that reading.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The Canaanite essay reads Athtar from ʿ-th-r, gives it the sense of light, and cites ʿathara "he found" and ʿithyar "dust". Arabic keeps the whole name in ʿaththariyy, with a doubled th, in the form Thaʿlab reported; the dictionaries define it as palms and crops that drink rain alone, so called "as though they had come upon water" without their owner's labour. The doubled th is the th and t of ʿṯtr with the t assimilated. Robertson Smith read ʿaththariyy as "belonging to Athtar", and showed from the traditions on the tithe, which he cites from al-Bukhārī and the Muwaṭṭaʾ, that it stands where baʿl stands: on what is watered by the sky and the springs "or is ʿatharī" a tenth is due, and in another version "or is baʿl". So in Arabic the names of Athtar and Baal are two names for the same land, land that drinks without being watered by hand, and in the story Athtar sits on Baal's throne and cannot fill it.

Linguistic Root

Athtar and ʿaththariyy

The Canaanite essay takes the root of the name to be ʿ-th-r, with the sense "light, shining, the radiant star", and cites Arabic ʿathara "he found" and ʿithyar, which it calls radiant dust. The ʿ, th and r are in their places: ʿ survives in Ugaritic, Phoenician and Hebrew and drops in Akkadian and Greek, and Ugaritic th answers Arabic th regularly and becomes sh in Akkadian and Hebrew. A fourth letter, t, is left outside ʿ-th-r. With this t Wyatt objected to Robertson Smith's derivation from ʿatharī: the t stays unexplained, and it cannot be an added letter inside the name.

The answer to the objection is in the dictionary itself. In Lane, ʿatharī is ʿidhy, what is watered by rain alone, of palms or crops, or by water running on the surface of the ground; it is so called "as though it stumbled upon water" without any labour of its owner; and Lane reports from Thaʿlab that in this sense it is ʿaththarī, with the th doubled. Arabic assimilates t to a th it meets, as Lane notes that iththaʾara is originally ithtaʾara. The doubling is the fourth letter, t: Athtar in Arabic is ʿaththar, and ʿaththarī is what belongs to him, with no added t needed. Lane also gives baʿl as palm trees that drink with their roots and need no watering, and reports that Abū ʿAmr made it a synonym of ʿidhy, the very word by which ʿatharī is explained.

Robertson Smith says that comparing the traditions on the tithe shows ʿatharī to be a synonym of baʿl or a kind of it: one reads "what is watered by the sky and the springs or is ʿatharī", another "or is baʿl". He then says that ʿatharī, which some authorities give with the doubling, seems to mean "belonging to Athtar", the god who corresponds in name to Babylonian Ishtar and Phoenician Astarte and is one of the South Arabian gods who preside over irrigation. A Sabaean inscription of the second century BCE in the British Museum records that a man built two aqueducts for three terraces to water two palm groves, and ends "By Athtar and by Almaqah"; the museum's note says the two gods were often invoked together in offerings connected with the fertility of irrigated lands, particularly at Marib.

The reading we settle on: the name ʿṯtr, with all four letters, is Arabic ʿaththar, kept in ʿaththarī as the name of land that drinks without labour. The essay's reading is right in its three letters, and the sense "he came upon" that it cites belongs to the explanation of the word itself, since ʿatharī is what has come upon water. Light is not among the root's senses in the dictionaries; it is the sense of the star the name designates.

The name and the star

Wyatt says the origin of the name is obscure and that in the masculine it is probably the name of the planet Venus, later extended to the feminine. Bomhard reports two views: Diakonoff held that the first sense of the Semitic word was "god" or "goddess" and that naming Venus with it came later in some languages; Blažek held that it first named Venus, the morning star, and was a compound of two parts, which accounts for the t in another way. The star and the watered land meet in Athtar from two sides: the star from what the name designates, ʿaththarī from the Arabic word.

The essay also lists athar among its comparisons; it begins with a glottal stop, while every West Semitic spelling of the name keeps ʿ, so athar cannot stand for the name. On the same reading the Babylonian essay reads Ishtar from ʿAthtar.

Set aside after the dictionary check: "light" as a sense of the root ʿ-th-r, which the dictionaries do not give; ʿithyar means rising dust, not radiant dust.

Shifts used: Ugaritic th is Arabic th and Akkadian sh; t assimilated to th in ʿaththarī; ʿ dropped in Akkadian and Greek.

Key Mythic Narratives

The one who climbs the mount of assembly in Isaiah

In Isaiah 14 the prophet mocks the king of Babylon at his death: "How are you fallen from heaven, O Shining One, son of Dawn", hêlēl ben šāḥar; you thought in your heart, I will climb to the sky, set my throne above the stars of El, sit on the mount of assembly on the summit of Zaphon, mount the back of a cloud and match the Most High, "instead, you are brought down to Sheol, to the bottom of the Pit". Watson says that at the level of myth the strongest affinity of these lines is with the Athtar episode of the Baal Cycle, strengthened by shared terms: "the mount of assembly" answers the gods' assembly in KTU 1.2 and "the summit of Zaphon" the heights of Saphon in 1.3. Craigie read Athtar's title ʿrẓ as "luminous", which would bring it near hêlēl, "the shining one", though this is not the common view. The verse also names the son of the Dawn, which joins it to Shahar and Shalim. Isaiah 14:12–15, Watson, "Helel", Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, pp. 392–394.

Athtar in the spells

In KTU 1.107, a spell for a man bitten by a snake, the gods are called in pairs to gather the poison: "Let El and Horon gather the poison; let Baal and Dagan gather the poison", and then "let Athtar and Athtapar gather the poison". Here he is one of the gods whose help is asked against venom; the god who drives the venom out in the story is Horon. Wyatt, KTU 1.107, pp. 393–394.

Athtar among the South Arabians

Parker notes that in the old South Arabian inscriptions Shahar is often named with ʿAthtar, with a dragon's head as an associated symbol. Abusch notes that a masculine god of this name is known in South Arabia and at Ugarit, and the feminine in Canaanite literature and the Bible.

Symbolic Reading

The Canaanite essay makes Athtar the god of light and the morning star, who tried to take Baal's throne after his death and could not rise to Baal's level; it says he "represents secondary light" and is sometimes linked with the planet Venus. The morning star appears before the sun and then fades in its light, a light that does not fill the day, which is what the essay means by secondary light.

The Arabic word sets the story on the ground. The throne Athtar cannot fill is Baal's, the lord of rain, and in Arabic ʿaththarī and baʿl are two names for what drinks without human labour. When Athtar comes down he rules the earth, and after his descent the text mentions water drawn from jars. Wyatt sees in this water a rite of the king's enthronement, since dispensing water is among a king's first acts.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In Mesopotamia the same name is a goddess's, Ishtar, and at Ugarit and Sidon it takes the feminine ending as Astarte. So Venus is male in South Arabia and at Ugarit, female in Mesopotamia and on the Phoenician coast.

Watson reports the view that the Greek myth of Phaethon, the Sun's son who asked to drive his father's chariot and fell, was confused with the story of Athtar who could not fill the throne when it reached the Levant, and that Isaiah's words on the son of Dawn came from both. Phaethon's story is on the Helios page.

In Iran the Tishtrya page reads the element -štr of the star's name with the Semitic name ʿAthtar, following those who hold that the Indo-European word for star was borrowed from it.

Athtar's story belongs to the divine council: El and Athirat choose the king, and in Isaiah the climber seeks "the mount of assembly". The throne he climbs to stands on Saphon, a sacred mountain. He sits on it while Baal is dead, so his story is a chapter of the dying and rising god.